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ContentsPorto Marghera – The last fi rebrands 3On the DVD you can fi nd... 4Presentation of the “Augusto Finzi workers‘ archive“ 7History of the Porto Marghera industrial zone 10Short chronology 15The class struggles in Italy 1968-1973 18Unions versus workers autonomy 22Operaismo 24About the history of the Potere Operaio (workers‘ power) 28The history of the workers‘ committee of Porto Marghera

Talk by Italo Sbrogiò, June 2006 33“The workers should take things into their own hands“

Interview with Gianni Sbrogiò, October 2006 48

AppendixThe Montedison and Enichem trials 53The dioxin cloud over Seveso 56The new chemical industry EC directive and the German unions 57“Struggle is worth it“

From a meeting about the struggleagainst asbestos, Padua, March 2006 58

Refusal of workText of the workers‘ committees in Porto Marghera from 1970 62

The characters in the fi lm 68Glossary 74

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Porto Marghera – the last fi rebrands

The title of the documentary has various meanings: the Italian word fuoco means ‘fi re’, and also a ‘shootout’. In this case, the word also means the fl ames of the petrochemical works that make the industrial zone visible from miles around. Its future is uncertain. The environmental damage that it has caused cannot be overlooked. The hundreds of deaths from cancer can never be undone. The most polluting parts of the industry have since been outsourced to East Asia, but Italy is still among the largest PVC producers.

In the fi lm, the fi re in the industrial wasteland where the illegal immigrants warm themselves is a symbol for the new class composition which has turned an emigration country into an immigration one.

But the phrase ‘the last fi rebrands’ also refers to the heat waves of class struggles that swept across this industrial zone in the 1950s, 60s and 70s; struggles that characterised the area and left a lasting impact upon it. Sometimes history takes a violent leap: in 1968 inexperienced peasants from the countryside were catapulted into the centre of the worldwide revolution. No working class had previously identifi ed the factory as a trigger of fatal diseases and as a destroyer of life as clearly as they did in this struggle. The union expelled the organisers of the struggles. Those who were expelled found their own organisational forms. Porto Marghera’s Autonomous Assembly in the early 1970s not only co-ordinated the struggles in the factories of the industrial zone, but also squatted houses, formed neighbourhood committees, organised price reductions in the supermarkets, and together with thousands of workers burned their electricity bills. The unions and the government could only react.

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On the DVD you can fi nd …The fi lm Porto Marghera – gli ultimi fuochi, created by Manuela Pellarin in 2004. It was fi lmed with funding from the Province of Venice, amongst others. It was fi rst screened in Venice and was going to have been screened on Arte TV, but then nobody wanted to hear about the fi lm any more. We saw it for the fi rst time in January 2005 at a private screening and were excited because here, speaking in their own words, were the protagonists of the struggles of the 1950s to 70s: the workers.The production company ControCampo was pleased that someone was interested in the fi lm, and gave us the rights to it. So we can now give it out as a free addition to Wildcat subscribers. Because we could not afford to buy the rights to use the original music (Johnny Cash ...), we have completely re-done the fi lm‘s soundtrack: the only music left from the original is the two songs by Gualtiero Bertelli, who accompanied the struggles with his guitar at the time.We have subtitled the fi lm in German, English, Spanish, Polish, Slovakian, Serbo-Croation, Romanian, Russian and Turkish. The French subtitles were already there.As an addition you can fi nd on the DVD a portrait of Augusto Finzi, in which he gives a personal resume of his political activities. Manuela Pellarin made this new cut from the existing material and showed it at the presentation of the ‘Augusto Finzi’ workers archive. We subtitled it in German and English.

Precarious work, subcontractors, poisoningThe old workers talk about the situation in the 1950s and 60s in the booming indus-trial zone and how they fought against it. The topics they mention are very relevant today:• Precarious work with four week contracts was the rule in the shipyard.• Similarly, subcontractors were very common, employing workers who came from far away, for low wages and under bad conditions. The workers from Porto Marghera led a huge, very militant strike against the subcontractors, demanding direct employment and equal treatment for all workers.• The handling of highly toxic materials is not a matter of the past: right now (autumn

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2006), the chemicals industry and the relevant unions are fi ghting hard against the introduction of a new EC directive for the chemical industry which includes a ban on the usage of toxic material if there is a possible replacement material.

The fi lm juxtaposes various levels:• The history of the workers struggle in the 1950s and 60s in the industrial zone.• Environmental damage and disease through the industry.• Discussions among young workers in 2002 about the closure of their department.• The new composition of the workers through migration.

The hidden historyThree of the workers interviewed were activists with the radical organisation Potere Operaio which aimed at the autonomous organisation of the working class and built up its own structures outside the unions. We have collated material about this on the following pages of this booklet.At the end, we have reprinted an old text of the Porto Marghera Workers’ Committee from 1970. You will need to have a little patience here to get used to the language, even more so because it is [a translation of ] an old German translation, which copied the pompous Italian language of workerism.

In the following texts the word ‘worker’ is used without its feminine form [which exists in German], because in Porto Marghera even the offi ce workers were men. If women worked there at all, it was in the canteen. In the Veneto in the 1960s and 70s, house-wife status within marriage was still very common. The feminist current that also arose in Veneto outside and against Potere Operaio instigated the ‘Wages for Housework’ campaign as a demand for a political wage for reproductive work.

All the concepts or names printed in blue and italics can be found either in the list of people appearing in the fi lm or in the glossary (sorted by topics, not alphabetically) at the end of this booklet.! !! ! ! ! "

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Presentation of the `Augusto Finzi‘ workers‘ archive

Marghera, 9 June 2006

Until today very little has been documented about the story of the workers’ struggle in the 1960s and 70s in Porto Marghera. The violent wave of repression after the 7 April 1979 which landed many comrades from the Workers’ Committee in jail for years, also led to most of those involved gathering all the materials they had at home, burning them or hiding them somewhere – and for-getting them.

Augusto Finzi, an important organiser in the Petrolchimico, donated his entire collec-tion of material to the city council of Venice as the basis for a workers’ archive shortly before his death from cancer in 2004. In the last two years, a few more old comrades met and founded the archive. They brought along their materials and recaptured some of the discussions from those times.

On the 9 June 2006 the workers’ archive is offi cially opened in the Marghera public library. Some of the original newspapers and leafl ets are on display, many of which we have previously only heard about. Many of them were copied on a stencil duplicator, as was common in those days.

First the deputy mayor gives a speech, then a lefty sociologist who has written a book about the dangers of Petrolchimico, then an archivist employed by the state, a young woman who had not been born when it was all happening: the occupati-on of the railway station, red fl ags in the trees, the burning barricades on the road dam to Venice.

A hundred people are sitting or stan-ding around the library. One of the old workers interviewed in the documentary

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Porto Marghera – Gli ultimi fuochi, Italo Sbrogiò, gives a talk. He reads out a long presentation* from his notes, recounting many names. It is gratifying to him today to sit here in this public library in com-memoration of Augusto Finzi, who had to sit in jail for several years after the 1979 anti-terror assault in Italy. For him it is gratifying to recount the names of acti-vists who founded this archive after the local press had libelled them so viciously during the late 1970s. And he still has to fi ght to ensure that their names are not drowned by those of all the professional supporters who decorate themselves with the exhibition and threaten to take it over.

In the room, there are comrades in struggle and supporters and friends: a lawyer who had defended the workers on sick leave, who must be about 90 years old, and the fi lmmaker of the do-cumentary who shows the newly cut in-terview with Augusto Finzi. Many of the comrades from those days had to look for some kind of source of income during the barren 1980s, in order to survive: they became travel agents or ran campsites, became reps for some product or other, left the country… Some still managed to

develop a career, while others struggled through for years selling homemade eco-logical jam.

There are only a few workers in the room. Workers’ autonomy was not a church whose members join for life. The explosion of workers’ rage in 1968 was spontaneous and momentary, says Finzi in the interview. Life-long political acti-vism was no more of a goal than life-long factory work was. "

* A summarised translation of this talk can be found on page 33 of this booklet.

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History of the Porto Marghera industrial zone

First industrial zone

Island with Venice old town

Mestre

Lagoon

Marghera (formally Venezia Porto Marg-hera) lies on the stretch of mainland within the Venice lagoon. The name co-mes from Venetian and actually means: where the sea was (Mar gh‘era); it is dried up tideland.

Since the 14th century successive rulers have carried out huge drainage and regu-lation projects on the mainland, which was the hinterland of the largest sea power of the Adriatic.

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1920s: The fi rst industrial zone

The industrialisation of the Veneto region began very cautiously in the middle of the 19th century. The liberal ruling class of the region was strongly rooted in agricul-ture and distrustful of new industry. After 1848 there was a fear of large concentra-tions of proletarians.

As a result of this fear, although indus-try grew noticeably in the Veneto after the formation of the Italian state in 1866, it did not affect the region politically or socially very much. The factories were mostly situated along the railway lines, i.e. on the outskirts of the towns. The only large textile factory was in Schio, at the foot of the Alps, called Lanerossi. With 8,000 employees, it was the fi rst fac-tory anywhere in Italy and it was run in a semi-feudal manner. The railway bridge to Venice and a new trading port were bu-ilt, but in contrast to other towns in the Mediterranean area there was no modern industrial zone until the early 1920s.

During the First World War, the in-dustrialists of Venice decided to build an industrial zone in Marghera. So in 1917 a quarter of what was then the Territory of

The defeat of the rural proletariat in Veneto through the formation of the Italian state in 1866 resulted in an emigration wave. En-couraged by the local clergy, they migrated to South and North America and later Aus-tralia. The local powers only wanted them somewhere so far away that they would not come back and bring strange new ideas with them. The emigration should be fi nal. This began to change after 1936 when fo-reign workers were being recruited by Nazi Germany: In 1935 in the province of Padua alone there were 30,000 unemployed – out of a total population of 400,000.

In 1949-50 the Minister of Work and the local powers sent huge numbers of people over the ocean for the last time – from Friuli, which borders the Veneto. After the expulsion of the Italian population from Yugoslavia, 30,000 Italians migrated to Australia.

the Community of Mestre was expropria-ted (it became part of Venice in1926) and given over to the Società Porto Industria-le di Venezia. This was supposed to fulfi l three aims: an industrial port, the creation of an industrial zone and building a new residential area on the mainland in order to relieve the lagoon area.

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During the 1920s and 30s the shipyards were the key industry. In the 1940s, du-ring the war, 35,000 people were already employed there. Most of the workers in this fi rst industrial zone came from the ‚urban‘ working class of Venice, Mestre and Chioggia where there had been rail-ways and shipyards since the 19th cen-tury. Here there were communist cores. During the war, the workers hid deserters and other refugees.

With the end of the Second World War the shipyard boom also came to an end, because the ship owners preferred to buy redundant American ships which had been mass produced in the previous years. Waves of redundancies and closures fol-lowed. In 1950 the workers at Breda suc-cessfully fought against the closure of that shipyard. After an armed police attack on workers, these organised a huge demo in Venice. The proletariat in Venice was left wing. The Communist Party (PCI) was present in the factories, although without waving their political fl ags around. In the countryside however the Party was absent, rural Veneto was a ‘white zone’ dominated by the Catholic Church. The only way out of the poverty was to emi-

grate. In the early 1950s the Christian Democrats (DC) organised a congress which discussed the problems posed by emigration for the ruling class: If people went to Germany, France, or even Milan, and then came back, then they would want running water, a fridge, and at least a scooter here as well.

1950s: The second industrial zone

The building of a second industrial zone was intended to secure control over the local proletariat: the construction of a modern chemical plant with an industri-al port, the processing of minerals from Sardinia, shipyards etc. were intended to create work and curb emigration. Politi-cally, this was a compromise between the Christian Democrats and the industrial alliance, above all with Montecatini and Edison, which was to set into motion a controlled development of Veneto – the workers were not to be infected by the di-sease of the agricultural workers in Emilia or the metal workers in Milan. Padua was also home to a large unit of Celere riot police, who had already been deployed against agricultural workers struggles in Ferrara.

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The workers for the new factories in the second industrial zone were often re-cruited from far away villages where the church and the DC exercised total con-trol. Many of them owned some land themselves, or farmed as sharecroppers. A recommendation by the village priest was a requirement for getting a job.

Adriatic sea

Second industrial zone

Island with Venice old town

Mestre

Lagoon

The Petrolchimico

The petrochemical plant originally belon-ged to the electrical company Edison. Fol-lowing the nationalisation of electricity production and the setting-up of ENEL in 1962-63, Edison bought Montecatini for the money the state had paid for its

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electricity plants and changed its name to Montedison. The Petrolchimico started operating in 1951. The fi rst departments were Chlorine Sodium Carbonate, TR1 (tetrachloroethylene production), AC2 (acetylene), CV1 (monomeric vinyl chlo-ride – MVC), CV3 (polyvinyl chloride – PVC), and in 1959 the CV6 department. Later on, the plant also started producing sulphuric acid, fl uoric acid etc.

The processing equipment at Marghera was initially a copy of the machinery used by Monsanto in Missouri and Tennessee. Monsanto also sold technically outdated patents to the Italians, outsourcing PVC and phosgene production to this country. In the USA at the time, phosgene was produced in the Arizona desert, whereas in Italy it was being produced two kilo-metres away from St. Mark‘s Square in Venice! The industrialisation of Italy took place with total disregard for the environ-ment or workers’ health.

In those years, the Porto Marghera Petrol-chimico was one of the most important chemical complexes in Europe. It reached its largest expansion during the 1960s. The building boom of the 1960s and 70s allowed for the rampant growth of the

town of Mestre without regard for any kind of urban planning, all the more so because the local council was busy con-centrating on Venice old town. For a long time the periphery around Mestre was a dormitory town almost entirely without infrastructure.

Today, the islands of Venice have about 70,000 residents, steadily decreasing, while about 270,000 people live in Me-stra-Marghera.

Today about 3,000 people work in Petrol chimico which refi nes crude oil and produces Phosgene and MVC. "

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1967 A few employees of Petrolchimi-co in Marghera found the group Potere Operaio (Workers‘ Power). They stand as candidates on the CGIL list for the Com-missione interna, and win a majority. Contact with the student movement. First leafl ets and the newspaper Potere Ope-raio – political newspaper of the workers of Porto Marghera are distributed.

1968 February: Students occupy the architecture department in Venice. April: textile workers‘ strike in Valdagno. 1 August: strike in Porto Marghera for the production bonus with the demand of an additional L 5000 for everyone. Barrica-des and occupation of the Mestre railway station.

1969 `Hot autumn‘ in Turin. Struggles of the chemical and metal workers in Mar-ghera. Formation of the workers‘ commit-tee at Ammi and election into the newly formed factory council. December: new national collective wage agreement. The response of the right wing and the secret services: the Strategy of tension; the left is framed for the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan.

Short Chronology

1970 The government passes the sta-tute of workers rights. In Marghera the outsourcing to subcontractors slips out of the control of the companies and the peace-keeping out of the control of the political parties and unions. In August the whole of Marghera is shut down by street blockades and clashes with the police, who fi re shots and wound some demons-trators.

1971 In various towns in Italy, including Marghera, Potere Operaio and Il Mani-festo jointly form the Political Committees (Comitati Politici), which only function for a few months. The workers‘ committes or-ganises hard struggles at department level for the reduction of work time.

1972 Workers‘ assemblies in Petrolchi-mico and Châtillon turn down the chemi-cal workers‘ collective wage agreement. The `autonomous assembly of Marghera‘ (Assemblea Autonoma di Porto Marg-hera) is formed. Its core is workers of the committees from Petrolchemico and Ammi, worker comrades from Lotta Con-tinua, employees from Petrolchemico and Châtillon as well as metal workers from

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DIMM. The area of struggle is expanded: neighbourhoods in town, infl ation, rent, electricity and gas bills. The main aim is organising from below and outside of the unions. They criticize the politics of the po-litical groups.

1973 The workers‘ committee joins with factory groups in other towns. A joint congress takes place in March in Bolo-gna. Start of a common newspaper.

June: break-up of the national organisa-tion of Potere Operaio.

September: the fi rst issue of Lavoro Zero [zero work] appears. Struggle against un-healthy working conditions, in cooperati-on with the health workers from Padua. Struggle for shorter work time in the dan-gerous departments.

1974 The Autonomous Assembly forms a struggle committee against infl ation. Campaigns for the fi xed price of bread [pane comune] and for Autoriduzione (self reduction) of electricity and gas bills. After four months of struggle the govern-ment and the unions sign an agreement to lower the price of electricity.

1975 Crisis of the workers struggles. Repression and the beginning of restruc-turing in the factories. The Autonomous Assembly of Porto Marghera prints a pam-

phlet about taking sickies. The fi rst num-ber of the four-sided weekly newspaper Contro Lavoro (Against Work) is printed. It appears every month until 1980.

1976 Chemical accident in Seveso. The three unions CGIL, CISL and UIL

decide to support the austerity measures at the congress in EUR, Rome, in order to reha bilitate the state budget. German Prime Minister Schmidt threatens the Italian government with the withdrawal of credit if the PCI is admitted into the ruling coa-lition.

1977 A new youth movement spreads across Italy, starting from Bologna. The employers‘ association and the unions sign an agreement which abolishes all au-tomatic wage adjustments, cancels seven public holidays, ensures the right of bosses to transfer a worker to another department or location, and introduces tough measu-res against absenteeism.

The strike in Marghera on the fi rst can-celled holiday is a failure. The workers‘ committee attempts autonomous compa-ny-wide wage negotiations. Workers take the unions to court over the cancelled bo-nus pay.

1978 The DC government‘s `national solidarity‘ under Andreotti is supported by

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the PCI. DC head Aldo Moro is kidnap-ped by the Red Brigades.

1979 7 April 1979: most of the aca-demics in the leadership of Autonomia Operaia i.e. ex-Potere Operaio are arres-ted based on the assumption of Paduan public prosecutor (and PCI member) Ca-logero that Red Brigades and Autonomia Organizzata have a common leadership. The arrested are charged with `subversive association‘ and insurrection against the state. This is the start of political mass ar-rests, not seen on this scale for decades.

In summer, Fiat sacks 61 workers on grounds of political violence in the factory (‚terrorism‘).

1980 24 January: in the third round of police raids more comrades of Contro-Lavoro are arrested, including Gianni Sbrogiò. The Red Brigades try to expand their infl uence with actions in Veneto and in particular in the industrial zone. On 29 January in Mestre they kill the vice-director of Petrolchemico, Sergio Gori.

A few months later they kill the head of the anti-terror department in Venice, Com-missioner Alfredo Albanese. The media link the workers‘ committee and its news-papers with these attacks.

5 February: a squad of the organisa-tion Prima Linea kills the engineer Paolo

Paletti, head of production at Icmesa, the chemical factory in Seveso.

At the beginning of the 1980s, 4000 political prisoners are sitting in Italian jails, accused of taking part in or suppor-ting armed actions. Many people are on the run, or go into exile. Investigations are underway against about 20,000 people.

September: Fiat announces 15,000 redundancies and temporarily lays off another 23,000 workers while the go-vernment goes on paying their wages (cassa integrazione). The workers begin a week-long strike. The march by 40,000 white-collar workers and foremen on the 24 October signifi es the defeat of the Fiat workers, and is seen as the end of an epoch.

1981 20 May: the boss of Petrolchimico, Giuseppe Tagliercio, is kidnapped by the Venetian branch of the Red Brigades and fi nally killed on the 7 July. The action is carried out simultaneously with three other kidnappings. It is the last common action before the Red Brigades split. "

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From reconstruction to the Hot Autumn – the class struggles in Italy 1968-1973

In the 1960s the development of industry in Italy lay far behind that of England, France or West Germany. The unions and the PCI were active in the partnership un-dertaking the reconstruction after the war. In the mid 1950s there was an economic miracle which mobilised huge numbers of proletarians to move from the country-side into the new factories. Despite the boom, unemployment in Italy remained high, therefore migration continued, not only from Southern Italy to Northern Italy (two million people between1955 and 1965), but also to West Germany, France or Switzerland. There was a per-manent oversupply of labour power and this was used to lower the wages. There were practically no state benefi ts for the unemployed.

After a long quiet phase, in 1962 the-re was the fi rst massive class struggle of the new working class composition in the centres of development, especially in Tu-rin. As an answer to the wage demands

of the workers, capital went into crisis. A deep recession put the breaks on the new struggles.

The next economic boom relied solely on the introduction of new exploitation methods of long work time and a lot of overtime. Work accidents increased shar-ply. The wages stayed far behind the dras-tic increase in work intensity.

From 1963 to 1967 the production rose by 26.7 percent, whereas the invest-ment from 1963 to 65 was reduced by one third and the number of employees dropped by 5.3 percent.

The gross domestic product (GDP) of Italy rose by 64 percent in real terms from 1959-1968. Production per employee rose by 73 percent. Industry grew by 64 percent in real terms from 1959-1968 and thereby increased its share of the GDP from 6 to 47.6 percent.

The economic growth in the 1960s was to a large extent based on the expansion of state industries, mainly comprising raw

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materials processing industry, iron and steel production, communication and transport (motorways). Private capital was mainly invested overseas – with the exception of the large family fi rms like Fiat, Pirelli or Olivetti, which expanded massively.

In the 1960s, there was a concentrati-on of many large Italian corporations; the most important production areas were monopolised by a mere two dozen fi rms. The state had a stake in 11 of the 22 lar-gest fi rms. The state holding companies IRI and ENI owned half of Montedison. This immediately brought a strong politi-cal element into the class confrontation.

However, in overall terms Italian in-dustry was still characterised by small and medium-size companies. There were comparatively few workers in the large fi rms. The 24 largest concerns employed only 654,000 workers (blue and white collar) in 1996 (Fiat 128,000, Montedi-son 119,000 and Pirelli 67,000), which amounted to 10 percent of the Italian

working class. This explains many of the particularities of the class struggles in Ita-ly, where the divide between the workers in large companies and those in small and medium size fi rms posed a signifi cant problem. The wage difference between employees in large and small companies was signifi cantly wider in Italy than the equivalent gap in Germany or France. Pensions were minimal. The wage zones meant lower wages were fi xed in the poo-rer regions.

The migration to the cities had trig-gered a huge housing problem. There was no adequate health provision. The proportion of indirect tax was higher in Italy than anywhere else in Western Eu-rope, and workers paid a disproportionate part of direct tax. White-collar and offi ce workers enjoyed extensive privileges, their wages were signifi cantly higher than those of the manual workers. The state determi-ned the conditions of exploitation and the social strata.

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1968-69

However, it wasn't long before the manu-al workers in Italy began to demand their share of this development. The Italian working class was at the forefront of the worldwide revolt against capitalist exploi-tation in 1968.

Social mobilisation also began in the universities in Italy, including in Venice, and by the spring of 1968 it already swept into the factories in the Veneto region. For example in Valdagno at the foot of the Alps, in the Marzotto textile factory which had until then been running mainly on the basis of paternalism and boss-friendly unions, 6,000 workers went on strike for weeks against the introduction of a new piece-work system.

When, on the 19th of April, scabs were sneaked into the factory under police pro-tection, the workers toppled the bronze statue of the factory founders from its plinth as a symbol of the fi rm‘s despotism and fought with the 1,000-strong police force brought from the whole region. 47 workers were arrested. On the 13th and 14th of July, in the Petrolchimico factory in Porto Marghera, 4,000 manual and1,000 white collar workers went on strike for an

increase in the production bonus to 5,000 Lire for everyone. On the 1st of August 1968 Porto Marghera experienced the high point of the strike wave with bur-ning barricades on the access road.

The `Hot autumn´, 1969

The general strike in France was limited to 13 days in May 1968. In Italy strike waves blocked the increase in productivity for almost two years. The Hot autumn in 1969 ranks as one of the most intensive collective mobilisations in the history of class struggle. In 1969 over 300 million hours of were lost due to strikes, 230 mil-lion of these in industry.

The struggle over the renewal of the wage agreement in various industries came to a head in the summer, most sig nifi cantly in the Fiat factory in Tu-rin. Against the lock-out of 35,000 Fiat workers the unions called for the exten-sion of the strikes. They demanded wage increases of between 15 and 19 percent, a 40-hour week etc. The workers in many factories went on strike spontaneously, often against the negotiation logic of the unions. Their demands were no longer centred around productivity growth,

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they demanded equal wage increases for everyone and attacked all forms of perfor-mance wages. Innovative organisational forms multiplied, taken on by the workers from the students. Everyone was equally entitled to talk. In Turin a long meeting took place with workers and students, they discussed what had been happening and wrote up leafl ets. Out of this came, among other things, the political groups Lotta Continua and Potere Operaio.

Shortly before Unions vs. workers au-tonomyChristmas, the metal union ma-naged to settle on a wage agreement, in which all the demands were broadly met, including parity for blue and white collar workers, three weeks a year holiday, abo-lition of unpaid days and elections for department delegates.

In Porto Marghera there was also an ex-tensive mobilisation by metal and chemi-cal workers. In March the workers at Châtillon managed to enforce a 36-hour week. The fi rm made concessions while the unions were excluding the left acti-vists. The year ended with a political vic-tory for the unions; but the agreement for the chemical works did not offer parity for the blue and white collar workers, and so was seen as a fraud by the workers.

On the 12th of December 1969 the state secret service’s strategy of tension re-ached its fi rst climax: killing 16 people and wounding 87 in an explosive attack at Piazza Fontana in Milan.

After 1975 there existed no more advan-ced form of workers’ organisation, either at Fiat or in Porto Marghera. The workers had brought production to a total stand-still. They had showed that capitalist pro-duction also produces death and disease. They had begun self-organisation both inside the factory and in life outside it. But revolution in the sense of a material overthrow of relations did not take place. The reform of the unions and the ‘green-washed capitalism’ of today is unthinkable without the struggle of these workers. "

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Unions vs. workers autonomy

After the Second World War, the union movement in Italy split into politically oriented unions under huge pressure from the USA, in order to isolate the commu-nists. The PCI and its CGIL union con-federation played a part in national re-construction and spoke in favour of forced industrialisation of the country in order to create modern jobs. They supported the policy of linking income to producti-vity increases. Due to the restructuring of companies for mass production, the old skilled workers, who were the basis of the PCI, lost their central place in the produc-tion processes. The newly employed, un-skilled workers from the countryside were seen as ‘apolitical’. The CGIL lost heavily in the works council (Commissione Inter-na) elections, especially at Fiat.

In 1962 thousands of Fiat workers protested in Turin against a separate wage agreement, which the UIL union had signed with the company. The workers‘ protest ended in street fi ghting lasting for days in Piazza Statuto in Turin, where im-

migrants from southern Italy and young communist cadre fought side by side against the police.

After the years of recession from 1963-1965, the next round of extensive wor-kers‘ struggles were not until the end of the 1960s.

The years 1968-1973 changed Italian society. The quickest to change with this were the unions. In the confrontations about the new wage agreement in 1969, the unions faced sharp, sustained cri-ticism from the left groups, and above all the criticism of the workers themsel-ves. The unions were being forced to go further than they would actually have wished to, by the ever more self-organised strikes in spring-summer 1969 at Fiat in Turin. The three rival unions CGIL, CISL and UIL agreed upon a much closer co-operation. The economy was booming and the workers could demand what they wanted from the companies. In some de-partments better conditions were negotia-

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ted without the union‘s involvement; the union saw this as creating divisions within the workforce. While the union defended the pay given to workers after they com-pleted their qualifi cations, the ‘mass wor-kers’ were now demanding, for example, equal wage increases for everyone as well as the free election and retraction of de-partment delegates. By taking up these demands, the unions succeeded in nego-tiating relatively good wage agreements, especially in 1969. While the left radical groups mobilised principally around hig-her wage demands, in order to confront the production of surplus value directly, the unions were increasingly mobilising around issues outside of production e.g. for cheaper fl ats or pension reform.

At the beginning of the 1970s, the long discussed statute of workers’ rights was passed by parliament. It was set up to strengthen the collective and individual rights of workers in the companies (en-titlement to equal treatment, freedom of political expression inside the company,

the right to strike, the right to workers assemblies inside the company, protection against redundancies in companies with over 15 employees, health protection, end of the regional wage zones [gabbie salari-ali] etc.)

The right to vote for (and retract!) the department – and shortly afterwards also the factory council – delegates was inscri-bed in numerous collective contracts.

The ‘union of councils’, based on the new councils elected by the shop fl oor, was supported by many left activists. The main benefi ciary was CGIL (particularly the metalworkers union), which through this body was able to use the factory councils to restructure and to win over new cadre.

The question of ‘delegation’ and ‘rep-resentation’, also the representatives’ poli-tics, was hotly discussed amongst the left radicals – while Lotta Continua took part, Potere Operaio criticized the unions and set itself fi rmly on the side of building up autonomous workers’ structures. "

24

Operaismo

Since the publication of the bestseller Empire (2000) by Michael Hardt and Toni Negri the term Operaismus, derived from the Italian operaismo, has been on everyone’s lips in the German-speaking world. However most people seem not to be too clear that the term referred to workers. (operaio = worker, hence also the common English translation ‘worke-rism’.)

At the end of the ‘50s and the begin-ning of the ‘60s a radical left political current emerged in Italy around the jour-nal Quaderni Rossi (Red Notes) and later Classe Operaia (Working Class). This cur-rent rejected the social democracy of the PCI and the PSI and their politics of na-tional reconstruction. They brought the-oretical weapons for the radical overturn of relations, contributing hugely to the renewal of Marxism. But above all, they brought a political practice that oriented itself around the actual struggles of the working class. They went to the workers’ city of Turin to carry out workers’ inqui-ries in the factories there. In Fiat they

found a situation of change and upheaval: old communist workers, who had been politically sidelined, young, discontented skilled workers, and unskilled workers, newly moved from the countryside, most-ly from the South, working in the facto-ries, having been farmers before this. In 1962, the fi rst struggle broke out. Starting from their involvement on a practical le-vel, the comrades developed a theoretical basis, radically applying Marxist method to start from the workers‘ perspective.

Class Composition...With their inquiry work at Fiat and Oli-vetti, the group around Quaderni Rossi wanted to create a new political relation to the working class. The problems and struggles of the working class should once again become the central reference point of revolutionary politics. This meant po-sing all the questions anew and above all (re)searching the real working class. The deep and drastic changes of the ’50s had changed the working class; replacement of coal by oil, expansion of conveyor belt

25

production, widespread use of cars, huge migration from the countryside etc. The unionists at electronics company Olivet-ti never really saw the new people from the countryside as real workers, and those workers themselves did not see their work as real work, but as ‘button pushing’.

The inquiries in 1961 attempted to in-vestigate: the origin of the workers, their precious work experiences, their accom-modation problems, what they do in their free time and their perception of the po-wer relations in the factory.

The fi rst ‘co’-inquiries focused on the workers as a whole person. This is in to-tal contrast to the ‘factoryism’ that much later characterised so many of the ‘work-place interventions’ by the left, i.e. the re-duction of the workers to their problems in the workplace, focusing on the ques-tions of wages, work time, breaks, and work organisation.

Quaderni Rossi upheld the thesis that a new composition of the working class would emerge, i.e. that the workers would put up a fi ght against the exploitation in

the new factories. ‘Class composition’ is more of a fi ghting slogan than a sociologi-cal term; it actually means there is a con-nection between the mode of production and needs, between work organisation and the organisation of struggle, and between the direct daily activity of the workers and their behaviour or practice.

… instead of class consciousnessIn a text that was later summarised in the book Workers and Capital, Mario Tronti placed ‘labour power’ and ‘working class’ in an antagonist relation to one another for the fi rst time. Labour power identifi ed the workers as variable capital, a factor of production to be exploited. Working class on the other hand is the seizing of a collective political power through the re-fusal of the expenditure of human labour power. This differentiation provided the basis for the methodological differentia-tion between the technical and political composition of the class.

By starting radically from the position of the workers, Tronti turned the relation

26

between ‘capital and work’ around from it’s orthodox representation: the political class composition is a historical given, that capital has to confront. “The class relation comes before the capital relation”. Mea-ning that the working class precedes the development of capital. And machinery is the capitalist answer. So worker struggle is seen as the aggressive force and not as a reaction to the exploitation suffered. This made Tronti’s text immensely attractive. It worked like a drug on the young militants of the 60s and 70s, because it implied the possibility (and feasibility!) of the revolu-tion.

Class composition meant the crystallisa-tion of behaviour, needs and the tradition of struggle. It was a material basis that re-placed the concept of ‘class con sciousness’ that would have to be brought in from outside of the class. Class composition contained both the technical structure of the class and how it consolidated them-selves (politically) in its struggles. But the process by which the labour force turns into the working class, remains contra-dictory in Tronti’s writing: at times he conceived of it as an almost mechanical process, in other places he voluntaristical-ly constructs a new political composition.

The switching between both interpreta-tions characterised operaismo from the beginning.

As a result of Tronti’s distillation of theory (e.g. class struggle as the main driving force of capitalist development), his conclusions became partly arbitrary, turning the biggest defeats into victories (for example seeing passivity as the work-ers’ refusal to struggle). ‘Operaismo as philosophy’ is not much good for analy-sis – even less so in defensive situations. However, there is also a methodological problem: if capital‘s every action is under-stood as a reaction to class struggle, then, implicitly, the inner connection between class and capital must be abandoned. To see the capital relation as a power relation throws the law of value overboard and ultimately divides economics and politics again. Here we can see the foundations being laid for the ontological derivation of the concept of Multitude, as Negri lays them out in Empire.

The central subject in the struggles in the factory in the 60s and 70s was the ‘mass worker’: the unskilled worker, who had to perform the same hand movements over and over again in the assembly halls and

27

conveyer belts, a far cry from any produ-cer or skilled worker’s pride.

When Sergio Bologna fi rst used the term in 1967 in a seminar in Padua, he wanted to use it to argue against reacti-vated concepts of Leninist organisation and show that the class composition of the mass worker has long superseded this notion. (The fi rst mass workers’ struggle took place in the 1930s in the USA). In the hot autumn of 1969 this mass worker theory was confi rmed in Italy.

Based on this special fi gure, a new phi-losophy of history was created. However, the acceptance of this new idea in turn forced any further inquiry work into a cage or rigid political framework. New formulations emerged such as ‘the law of the movement of the working class’ or ‘a particular technical composition of labour force necessarily corresponds to a typical system of social practice. It has to correspond to a particular political ex-pression…’. The continuation was then to form an organisation that was sup-posed to unify this working class – which was diametrically opposed to the original thinking behind the workers’ inquiries.

Workers and workerists

In the last few years lots of books have come out in Italy, going over the history of the 60s and 70s. A few are dedicated to the ‘workerists’, who have given personal interviews for the fi rst time and told their version of history. Hardly any of these books (with the exception of the one by La Nazione journalist Aldo Grandi!) had bothered to also interview the workers who were the actual protagonists of this cycle of struggles. For a few years, during the ‘workers’ inquiries’ in the 60s and in the years 1968-1973, there was a collabo-ration between the left intellectuals sear-ching for the revolutionary subject and the workers in revolt, from which both sides profi ted: the workers found new instruments for changing the world, the intellectuals gained new insights. After this collaboration came to an end, the fi rst group were still workers and the second still academics. In Italy hardly any of these comrades went into the factories themsel-ves, whereas in Germany for example they sometimes did. "

28

The organised autonomy of the working class

The history of Potere Operaio (workers power)

Potere Operaio [Workers’ Power] was initially the name of a few local groups, who related to the working class inde-pendently of the union. Their theoreti-cal point of reference initially came from the newspaper Classe Operaia [Working Class], which was founded in 1963 by the interventionist tendency within the Quaderni Rossi newspaper. Going beyond their own inquiry work, they aimed their publications directly to the workers. The editorial group in the Veneto reshaped it-self around Toni Negri, who was then a lecturer at Padua University.

In 1967 the last issue of Classe Operaia was published, and shortly after this Potere Operaio – giornale politico degli operai di Porto Marghera started up and was pu-blished until 1969. The themes of the newspaper were: more money; less work; against piece work; against the intensifi ca-tion of work; against endangering health; against redundancies and short-work; 40

hours weeks, with 48 paid hours; gua-ranteed minimum wage; equality for all workers; against privilege and against pro-duction bonuses. In the same year the fi rst Congress of Potere Operaio Veneto-Emili-ano, attended by worker-activists, took place in Mestre.

The national organisation Potere Opera-io emerged in 1969 from the connections of local groups in Genoa, Milan, Turin and the Veneto. These groups had made their relation to the working class and the interventions in the factories as their focal point. Shortly before this, in Turin, the organisation Lotta Continua was formed from a tendency of worker and student assemblies, who had agitated at Fiat du-ring the whole Hot Autumn. Up to this point, ‘La Lotta Continua’ [the struggle is still on] had appeared as a slogan on all the leafl ets. In 1969 the fi rst national newspaper Potere Operaio ap peared.

29

The refusal of work and Leninism

‘Cominciamo a dire Lenin’ [Let’s start saying Lenin], began an editorial by Fran-co Piperno in 1969. This replaced the slogan ‘every economic struggle is also a political struggle’. Now it was all about building up the organisation in order to reach the economic aim. According to Negri, Leninism was the price to be paid for the political new composition of the Italian proletariat. ‘Politics’ now meant Lenin.

While for the rival organisation Lot-ta Continua everything started from the spontaneity of the work ers struggles, Pote-re Operaio emphasised the aspect of orga-nisation. The political programme spoke of a direct transition to communism from the extension of the struggles to insurrec-tion and organised mass insurgency. At its height, about 10,000 activists were invol-ved in Potere Operaio (to a greater or lesser extent).

The regional groups also represented the different social compositions: you had the industrial north with its workers groups, then Rome with on the one hand proletarian/sub-proletarian groups and

on the other hand those from the terti-ary sector such as local administration or hospitals. The health workers in the cli-nics were an organisational focal point of Potere Operaio. The infl ux via the stu dent movement changed the composition even more and thereby the political bias of the group.

The cultural difference between the workers’ groups and the groups with more students and aca demics in Florence and Rome was not free of tension.

While the comrades from the latter groups used their time as a group to also go out together or go on holiday and had lots of time for discussions, in Veneto the work in the factory claimed a good part of the time, as did the assemblies after work, distributing leafl ets etc. The time for na-tional or regional meetings was pretty tight.

Porto Marghera was ‘the’ concentrati-on of workers, where Potere Operaio really had an infl uence, but politically the com-rades from Porto Marghera were some-what on the sidelines of the Organisa tion. At the Potere Operaio congress in Florence in January 1970, it came to a confrontati-on about spontaneity and Leninism. Finzi from the Porto Marghera Workers‘ Committee

30

took up the follow ing position: what the workers do, i.e. hold assemblies in the factory, write leafl ets etc, is actually spon-taneous organising. The workers’ commit-tee leads and educates the working class. Revolution ary organising develops within the working class, starting from material needs. The workers’ co-or dination is not an information service about struggles, but a political decision making body, a co-or dination of the workers avant-garde. The organisation is merely an instrument for a direct struggle for concrete aims.

It came to a political division between on one hand those who wanted to con-tinue the ‘workerist’ practice of rank and fi le work in the factories. And on the other hand those who, after the Hot Au-tumn of 1969 ended due to the new coll-ective contract, felt that the time was right to put all their energy into building up an organisation aimed at political overthrow.

New alliancesSeptember 1970: attempted fusion into political committees with the group called Il Manifesto, which controlled the il ma-nifesto newspaper, which Potere Operaio would have liked to turn into the daily paper of the political committees, in or-

der to spur on the unity of the vanguard. It was not deemed necessary to report on the struggles of yesterday, but rather to offer guidance today on the struggles of tomorrow.

A joint workers’ conference in January 1971 in Milan: 76 workers’ groups from Il Manifesto and 68 groups from Potere Operaio took part. From the content of their speeches, it seemed the two groups had an abyss between them. Potere Ope-raio delegates emphasised that it was all about tear ing away the mask of the state, to make visible the violence that ensured its domination over the working class. In the light of the tremendous levels of struggle the party now had to organise and the uprising had to be prepared.

Il Manifesto was set on long and drawn out guerrilla tactics, putting forward de-mands for the attain ment of the abolition of piece work, better working hours and a better work environment. To go beyond unionism requires autonomy and a unifi ed organism of the working class: the politi-cal com mittee as a preliminary form of a party and as a motor for the emergence of an unifi ed organ of the working class.

While the national leadership had al-ready given up on co-operation, in Porto

31

Marghera there was a joint intervention in the factories from February to April 1971 with the slogans: “employ more people and give a 36 hour week to everyone”, “introduce a fi fth shift”, “wage increases in inverse proportion to qualifi cations”, “no piecework or work intensifi cation”, “no profi t-dependent bonus payments”.

Split …At the congress in the EUR district of Rome in September 1971, Potere Operaio actually split around the question: keep organising the mass workers, or anticipate capitalist development in the terrain of the ‘socialised worker’ (operaio sociale).

In the end, the following position won out: to come out of the factories, to push the organising into the ‘terrain’. To pre-pare for the insurrection. Many people did not agree with this and left the or-ganisation.

The drive to build up a party, and ever more national congresses, no longer helped the workers in Porto Marghera. Instead, they built up a network of auto-nomous workers‘ groups in Milan, Rome and Naples and brought out a joint news-paper.

… and break-upThe organisational conference in Rosalina in June 1973 ended without either a so-lution or a new statute. The local groups transformed into the Organised Autono-my. During the youth movement in 1977 there was an infl ux of a whole new genera-tion of activists.

After the dissolution of Potere Ope-raio, the ‘Negri-ists’ met in the summer of 1973 in Padua. They wanted to hold on to the thread of factory struggles. Finzi and Sbrogiò represented the Autonomous Assembly. Their attitude was every more rigid: only the shop-fl oor workers were al-lowed to repres ent them to the outside, no ‘external’ members.

`Mass militancy‘ or armed struggleAfter 1969 all the radical left organisa-tions had built up groups of armed ‘stew-ards’, who initially safeguarded leafl eting actions in front of factories, schools etc. and protected against fascist attacks.

After the dissolution of the organisati-ons, these ‘military wings’ made themsel-ves independent. One part founded the group Prima Linea; the leadership of the stewards of Potere Operaio in Rome joined the Red Brigades. "

32

“The split and break-up of Potere Operaio happened on the basis of the antagonism of three positions:a) The project to build up a new partyb) Glorifi cation of the spontaneity of the socialised worker and organisation of the

vanguards.c) The search for a dialectical relation between new subjects and historical orga-

nisations.Positions a) and b) shared the belief that the time was ripe for the beginning of the revolutionary process, but they differed fundamentally in their idea of organisation; the fi rst had a late-Leninist idea, while the second wanted to connect with the mass vanguard.

Position c) thought that both of these positions were totally unrealistic and presumptuous. Now that the phase of the political groups was coming to an end, it was seen as more useful to analyse the new social di mensions of the confl icts from within, and thereby to look at how the capitalist response to the crisis creates cont-radictions within class composition. This position wanted to try to open channels of communication, primarily with the unions, who had proven themselves to be more open to the new reality than the parties were.”

(Bianchini/Pergola, foreword to the reprint of `Potere Operaio – giornale politico degli operai di Porto Mar ghera´, 1967-69), Padua 1980.

33

The history of the workers‘ committee of Porto Marghera

Talk by Italo SbrogiòGiven at the presentation of the `Augusto Finzi‘ workers‘ archive, Marghera, 9 June 2006

34

In 1952 the fi rst chemicals factory was set up in Porto Marghera, the chlorinated soda department, which was to become the motor of growth for an integrated pro-duction cycle with other parts such as; tet-rachloroethylene, trichloroethylene, vinyl chloride (from which polyvinyl chloride, PVC, is made by a process of polymeri-sation).

The workers came from the countryside and therefore had mostly received their skills from self-education, in contrast to the company management, many of whom came from the Fascist tradition.

Amongst the workers there were also PCI members. Employed with the ap-proval and guarantee of the priests, the communists were diligent workers, the PCI had taught them that a good worker = a good communist.

We worked with our heads down, but with a huge will to rebel against all the harassment that we endured on a daily basis.

In 1958 there was no CGIL there. It was fi rst created when some communist workers stood for election for the works council, and won a majority. These com-rades then formed Potere Operaio. They were joined by comrades from the white-collar departments.

Working in the Petrolchimico was really hard, what with the assaults by the fore-

men and the spying by the factory secu-rity; if you were denounced by them for whatever reason you would be punished immediately. The attitude of the company was very varied, ranging from sackings to merciless pa ternalism. This was supposed to break the workers‘ unity, which despite all this actually was making progress.

New Contacts

In 1964 the fi rst so-called intellectuals ap-proached us. I met Toni Negri and Guido Bianchini who had already made contact with a communist worker in Vetrocoke by this time, comrade Pistolato, who was the chairman of a circle which saw itself as a people‘s university.

In the time which followed I also met Massimo Cacciari, Francesco dal Co and other comrades.

At these meetings we learned to do politics by participating in the debates, everyone at the same level.

From the PCI and its centralised politics we were used to obeying orders and this kind of politics which brought us into a vanguard role was new for us.

Our fi rst leafl et

In 1967 the fi rst leafl et by Potere Operaio appeared in Porto Marghera. It was about

35

the works council elections. The workers already saw us as members of Potere Operaio and we were re-elec ted with a majority. We distributed the fi rst political newspaper by Potere Operaio in the fact-ory in March 1967 and the second one in May, with Francesco Tolin as offi cially responsible.

The content of these two fi rst issues was based on reports which workers‘ autono-my vanguards had collected from across the whole of Italy.

In Porto Marghera (Petrolchimico) the-fi rst repression occurred. Comrade Bruno Massa was for cibly transferred to Bussi in Abruzzo [a region in Central Italy]. Au-gusto Finzi was internally trans ferred sev-eral times. This cruel attack only made us stronger. I too was banished to a punitive de partment in order to prevent me from having daily contact with workmates.

Once of our fi rst goals was to turn the struggles for our material needs into mass struggles. The group of workers who shared our goals organisationally and in content led up to our fi rst factory congress in September 1967 in the suburbs of Mes-tre. We argued for the strategy that Potere Operaio should intervene in all the facto-ries. As members of the works council, we argued for the equality of blue and white collar workers.

1968: 5000 Lire for everyone

This phase gave birth to the fi rst workers‘ committee. When the production bonus was up for rene gotiation in June 1968, we demanded 5000 Lire for everyone. The workers understood our egalit arian demands and involved themselves in a hard struggle which enforced the princi-ple and man aged to squeeze out 1000 Lire for everyone. The rest would also be paid out equally, but remained tied to the development of productivity. In order to achieve this we had held several demos and oc cupied the train station in Mestre.

The Hot Autumn

The so-called hot autumn brought workers and students closer together; we partici-pated in common discussion groups and took to the streets together. In January 1969 we agitated all across Italy for the standardisation of the wage agreement. We also suggested rank and fi le commit-tees in all the factories with the aim of a guaranteed minimum wage of 120,000 Lire (at the time the minimum wage was 55,000 Lire) a 40 hour week with 48 hours paid, holiday and health insurance at equal levels for everyone.

In June 1969, as the workers‘ commit-tee in Porto Marghera (a few of us were

36

CGIL-members), we fought against the union caving in and organised struggles in production; not the pinpoint strikes that the union was proposing in order to af-fect production as little as possible. We directed the workers‘ attention to the `wage zones‘ [in the old wage agreement different wage levels were set for differ-ent regions of Italy] and to the possibility of converting the production bonuses to a 14th month wage for everyone. We also focused on exposing Montedison‘s health risks policies; the company only declared seven departments as health risks — an adjustment to the lowest standard when Edison and Montecatini merged and cre-ated Montedison.

In the factory, we did not present oursel-ves as a fourth union, but rather as an autonomous organisa tion with the slogan `less work, more wages‘.

In July 1969, as the workers‘ committee of Porto Marghera, we spoke about focus-sing our struggles on the abolition of the sub-contractors, whose employees worked with shitty conditions and with many daily work accidents, because they were seen as second-class workers. All workers are ex ploited, but those employed by the sub-contractors are doubly exploited if they work 10 to 12 hours a day and get paid only 130 to 140 hours per month at a rate of 280 or 300 Lire per hour, which also

covers holiday pay, Christmas bonuses and the like. Another reason then, to fi ght together for 1000 Lire a day, for a 40 hour week, for a 36 hour week for shift workers, for equal holiday time, equal health insurance and equal pensions for all, blue and white collar workers.

Between May and June 1969 the CGIL held its seventh regional congress. In the debates delegates showed concern about the re-election of the Potere Operaio repre sentatives in the Petrolchimico. In his speech, the regional secretary of the met-alworkers‘ union indicated that the union did not really play the leading role: `In several cases we were not prepared for the pressure of the workers with their spon-taneous organisational forms‘.

37

Exclusion from the union

Bit by bit the Potere Operaio factory group was expelled from the CGIL. We were ac-cused of not toeing the line. We answered that they were right, we were not in line, because we had always fought against the line of capitulation. More and more work-ers followed our line: If a worker from the CV5 de partment (PVC production) was sacked due to false allegations, the union tried to get him back into the factory, but without success. The worker then turned to us at Potere Operaio and asked us for help. We then organised a picket line at 6 a.m. without much advance notice and blocked the fact ory until the worker was reinstated.

In August 1969 the union ordered the dissolution of the works council and orga-nised re-elections. We decided not to par-ticipate. When the votes were counted, over 50 percent of the ballot slips were blank.

November 1969. The wage demand by the chemical workers‘ union was piti-ful: 12,000 Lire more per month, a perio-dic increase of seniority bonuses between 3 and 5 per cent, increase of the minim um bonus from 2 per cent to 5 per cent, a 40 hour week spread over fi ve days and a minimum of 15 days holiday a year. In addition to that the union demanded an in-

dex-based extra payment for health-dama-ging work [meaning that the more health damaging the work, the more money you get]. In the assemblies, the Petrolchimico Workers´ Committee and other groups ut-terly refused these de mands. At that time, the Petrolchimico Workers´ Committee, the Rank-and-fi le Committee Mon tedison Ferrara and the Workers‘ Students‘ Com-mittee Montedison Mantua joined forces and fought for common aims: equal wage increases for all, nobody must earn less than 120,000 Lire per month, a 40 hour-week for those on normal shifts, a 36 hour-week for those doing shift work. We wanted everything and we wanted it right away. Because of unemployment, techno-logical development and health damage, and because the factory was more or less like a prison, we wanted to spend as little time as possible inside.

38

The centrality of the wage

This is why the wage became the central issue. If the wage is too low, shorter work-ing hours will not be of much use. If we lack money we will always be forced to do overtime and the reduction of working time will be no more than a bluff. There-fore we also demanded equal holidays, equal health insurance and equal wage increases according to seniority for blue collar and white collar workers, starting

right away. Forms of struggle which dis-rupt production as severely as possible and which force the bosses to their knees: one day we walked out, the next day we didn‘t.

In late 1969 the employees of Châtil-lon in Porto Marghera announced their demands for the collect ive contract, which already sound familiar: from working time reduction to equal wage increases for all. The bosses answered with open threats. We immediately distributed a leafl et in the Petrol chimico saying that it is in our own interest to join the Châtillon workers with effective forms of struggle, meaning the stop-and-go strikes that we were already familiar with.

The struggle became harder and har-der and we reduced the emergency staff responsible for the safety of the plant from 125 to 32, which meant the actual stop-ping of production instead of main taining a minimum production. The political im-pact of Potere Operaio in the Petrolchi-mico became more and more signifi cant and more and more organised. On 10 October 1969 Fiat in Turin was oc cupied by the workers and there was internal fi ghting during the hunt for scabs. As Pote-re Operaio, we hailed the occupation: we must not suffer any wage cuts as a result of traditional strikes; we have the power to force the bosses to their knees, we just

39

have to use it. Our slogan was: `United with the struggle at Fiat we will bring the bosses to their knees‘.

The union of councils

The reformism of the PCI developed at high speed; the CGIL was the party‘s transmis-sion belt in its attempt to regain the upper hand over the organising process of the workers. The Commissioni in terne were actually outdated, so a new union repre-sentation was established in the factories, based on a fake representative democ-racy. The fi rst department delegates were elected directly from the shop-fl oor level and it was possible to vote for non-union members. This was supposed to make them credible to us. We have to admit that with the factory councils they partly suc-ceeded.

In view of this, we, the vanguard, put our back into it and said that the inter-vention inside the factories would have to be carried to the outside, to the ‚social‘, as well, broaching the issue of the rise of living costs. Some of us did not agree with putting the intervention inside the factory and its demands and representation in second place. We had a general debate and came to the conclusion that the facto-ry councils were not what they had been proposed to be. Some comrades from

Potere Operaio got elected anyway, even into the board of the factory council, be-cause the workers wanted it that way. This had been very diffi cult to achieve against heavy resistance by the union. Many of us perceived these new representative institutions as another challenge, similar to the process of our emergence from the Commissioni interne.

Uniting factory struggles and social struggles

Let‘s talk about the social struggles. We called for the auto-reduction of public transport fares, of rent, gas, electricity and food prices. We managed to achieve all that in the Petrolchimico and we even managed to drag the union along. The practice of self-reduction then spread in the neighbour hoods including the city of Venice. People lowered rents, occupied empty houses, paid less for their food. We organised all this by establishing local committees in the various parts of town. We even managed to organise a shop-ping strike which forced some supermar-kets (Ca d‘Oro, Coop, Pam) to cut prices for basic food (you would save about 1,000 Lire out of 8,000). The committees for self-reduction (Comitati di autoriduzi-one) spread as far as Chioggia, where about 2,500 families reduced their bills.

40

In the province of Venice in total about 15,000 families took part.

The committee organised a big self-re-duction demonstration, which started from the bridge in Mestre, heading towards the Piazza Ferretto, where we started a huge fi re by burning all the gas and electricity bills which we had reduced. After four months of nationwide protests the govern-ment and union signed an agreement which cut the price of electricity. Those involved in the committee said that such a strong bond between the factory and the neighbourhood had never existed before.

Factory work makes you sick!

Let‘s talk about the 1970s. The health damage in the factory and in everyday life became worse and worse, unbear-able, I‘d say. The unions remained silent about what to do about it. Accidents and acute poisoning happened every day. Po-tere Operaio was aware of the problem and picked up the protest of the workers. We said that money cannot compensate for health damage. Workers don‘t go to work in the factory in order to do inquir-ies, but because they are forced to. Work isn‘t a way of life, but the necessity to sell oneself in order to be able to live. And it is this very struggle against work, against having to sell oneself, which attacks all the

rules of this society. We fought against the health hazards by fi ghting for having to work less, for not having to die of poison-ing through work. It damages your health to get up every morning to go to work, to follow the rhythm and movements of production, to work shifts, to bring home a wage which forces you to go back to the factory the next day... all this damages your health.

Strikes kicked off against health da-mage, tough ones as well. The workers surpassed the absent uni on, which was contented with the mere fact that now every worker had a health pass. Not only Potere Operaio, but also Lotta Continua and other groups acted against the apa-thy of the union, and against the apathy of the left-wing parties. The institutions were nearly absent. Our slogan was: clo-sure of the factory, refurbishment of the plant, and re-opening while Montedison continued to pay the wages. The strugg-les got `bloody‘, until nearly the whole factory came to a standstill, includ ing the chemical facilities which Montedison had always claimed could not be stopped wit-hout causing their destruction.

At this point we were summoned by the health and safety authorities. After the au-thority had listened to all parties and un-derstood that dozens of poisoned workers had to be sent to hospital due to daily di-

41

scharge of gas, it decided that from now on all workers in Porto Marghera had to wear gas masks. This decision sparked great debates. The union tried to appear more left-wing than us and pointed out that this measure would have to include not only the factories in Porto Marghera, but also those in the adjoining areas. They really made a joke of themselves: in the midst of the strike we organised a crucifi xion on the square in front of gate 3 of the Petrolchimico. We erected a four metre high cross, a puppet wearing a gas mask was attached to it, symbolising Jesus Christ. A sign said: `Montedison lets you die a second time.‘

We demanded that the company fi nd out the reason for the health damage and eliminate it by clos ing the plant and the department while continuing to pay wa-ges to the affected workers, re-opening the plant afterwards.

The strike during the collective agree-ment negotiations also included demos inside the factory, copying the demos at Fiat Mirafi ori, which for us in Marghera were legendary. It was a form of struggle which expressed the unity of the workers. When they were motivated and angry, the in ternal demos were a success, otherwise it was better to forget about them. As long as the committee had a network inside the factory we could organise these demos

and even force the union to support them. During the demos we were able to make out the few workers who tried to chicken out. Later on in the canteen we ousted these workers by banging our plates, something which I think is psy chologically diffi cult to bear. In order not to suffer this treatment a lot of potential scabs joined the strike.

Co-operation with il manifestoIn 1970 and 1971, in Porto Marghera il manifesto and Potere Operaio formed the Political Com mittee, which survived for only a few months. We let people know about it through some leafl ets and a congress, which I think took place in the department of architecture of the univer-sity in Venice. The stuff that was spoken about during the congress was more up our street. I think il mani festo was looking for allies to help them get their daily news-paper going in the Veneto. In Mar ghera,

42

they were formed by a few comrades who had left the PCI, including only a very few work ers. We were closer to Lotta Continua than to Il manifesto.

The reform of the union

During the early 1970s the politics of the union was about the ‚structural reforms‘. After the tax re form the wage tax was de-ducted directly from the workers‘ wage; the employer became an auxiliary of the state. The reform introduced the value-

added tax IVA, replacing the old sales tax IGE and leading to a big price hike. Then there was the reform of the health system which turned company doctors and judg-es into combatants against absenteeism.We perceived these reforms as an at-tempt to pull wool over the workers‘ eyes. We wanted to build an alternative to the political line of the union, regarding the forms of struggle as much as the aims. Our alternatives were demands for ma-jor wage increases, for the reduction of

43

wage categories and for automatic pro-motion. Against the health hazards there was a precise demand and a mass strug-gle: closure of dangerous departments – refurbishment and continued payment of wages — with subsequent re-opening. On an individual level we made use of absenteeism. Against the price in creases we proposed reappropriation [collective shoplifting: often referred to as la spesa proletaria – `proletarian shopping‘], the reduction of housing rents and electricity bills. We also proposed harder forms of struggle, in the factory: strikes that would actually stop production.

A network of shop-fl oor collectives

In 1972 we intensifi ed contact with other shop-fl oor based groups which were not tied to political organisations or which were sick of being their `mass organisa-tion‘. These groups were based in Milan (at Alfa, Pirelli and Siemens), in Rome (the polyclinic, ENEL), in Naples (Uscri) and in other factories. Together we published a few issues of the magazine Il Bollettino degli organismi auto nomi operai (Bulletin of autonomous workers‘ organisations).

In late 1972, the committee managed to topple the collective agreement for the chemical industry in the company assem-

blies at the Petrolchimico and at Châtil-lon. Carried by this wave of success and led by the will to organise independently, the Assemblea Autonoma di Marghera (Autonomous As sembly of Porto Marghe-ra) was established. The core was made up of workers from the committee, from Lotta Continua, workers from the Petrol-chimico and Châtillon who had left the union, and metal workers from Ammi and Dimm. The Assemblea was formed based on the historic aims of the Committee: re-duction of the working week to 36 hours at equal wages, because new machines in crease the power of dead labour over the workers; wage categories based on seniority rather than formal skills, because the skills which the bosses demand can be obtained after few years in the facto-ry; refusal to work in departments which are hazardous for our health as the most direct way to avoid the damaging con-sequences; complete equality between blue and white-collar workers in or der to be able to fi ght together effectively. The other central thread of the intervention was the in tention of carrying our topics from the factory to the neighbourhoods: prices, rent, electricity, the auto-reduction of bills as a re-appropriation of the wage. The prime intention was bottom-up organ-ising, outside of the union. The Assemb-lea Autonoma aimed at establishing the

44

department commit tees as capillary orga-nisms inside the factory. We criticised the political groups, including Potere Opera-io, for ‚fl eeing forward‘.

Against ‚fl eeing forward‘

In May 1973 the congress of Rosolina took place. By then the different tenden-cies and local branches of Potere Operaio had only little in common. We from Mar-ghera went to the congress de termined to speak for our own practice, that is, to point out all the factory collectives which were constantly being organised outside of the political groups and had demands beyond those of the uni on and which wanted to organise and coordinate themselves just like we did. There was no space for the Party of insurrection and for escapist moves towards a militarization of the confl ict. We thought that it was correct to speak of the socialized worker instead of the mass worker, but we completely disagreed when it came to the question of how to organise the socialized worker and ourselves. At that time, we were ut-terly rigid. Only people who worked in a factory themselves, no ‚externals‘, were allowed to speak for the Autonomous Assembly. We wanted to go back to the basics and return to the times when the vanguard of an organisation would be

formed by those people who, in the mate-rial sense, fought the battles in the schools and factories – not by those who only in-structed them. We wanted to break with the tendency of delegation where the in-dependent vanguard creates facts and the group then fi ghts over the leadership.

Up to 1974 the workers‘ committee and later the Assemblea Autonoma used the magazines Potere Operaio del Lunedì and, later on, Rosso. We used them in order to substantiate and generalise our own analyses and to communicate with other groups. We then started to publish a little zine of about 30 pages called Lavoro Zero (Zero Work). We wrote, printed and distributed it ourselves. It was our response to various needs and was supposed to serve various goals, fi rst of all organising. We wanted to create a reference point and a certain unifi cation amongst the struggles in the depart ments which became very frequent during this stage and were organised by us. A fac-tory newspa per capable of expressing and combining the interest of all work-ers, publishing not only leafl ets from the struggle but also a general analysis of the situation. For us this level of political practice was already the `Party‘: from the struggle in the department towards a gen-eral analysis of the situ ation, in order to

45

combine the economical and political. On those levels we contributed all we could. On the other levels, though, we either just went along with things, remained passive, or dis agreed outright.

During those years living costs someti-mes increased by about 15 to 16 per cent a year, although in fl ation compensation partly cushioned the impact. The bosses claimed that the infl ation was itself caused by infl ation compensation, and many reformists (political parties and others) shared this pos ition. Back then compensa-tion for infl ation was calculated based on the wage category, so that those who ear-ned little also received little compensati-on. They also told us the fairytale that ‚you must not demand higher wages, because the infl ation will swallow them anyway‘. We thought we should intervene outside of the factories as well in order to make our point of view heard.

Some female comrades and women from the proletarian areas of Mestre tried to combine this struggle with the demand of a wage for housework.

During the following years the ‚commit-tee for struggle against price increases‘ organised the auto-reduction of rent and occupied houses. That was us!

Our end

In 1976 the political climate was terrible.

Between the ‚historic compromise‘ and `the politics of sac rifi ce‘, the PCI under Berlinguer had lost its track completely. The union, with its leaders Lama, Carniti, and Benvenuto, became the transmission belt for a responsible politics in the face of the severe economical crisis. Inside the factories they enforced the EUR [part of Rome where the union congress had tak-en place] politics of sacrifi ce by signing strangling agreements intended to curb wage costs and increase productivity. The sellout of the workers got worse and worse; the division between ‚permanent‘ and ‚casual‘ workers was bearing fruit. We didn‘t manage to organise struggles with a promising political perspective any longer.

In late 1976 the law to cool down com-pensation of infl ation passed. In January 1977 the employ ers‘ association and uni-ons signed an agreement which stipulated amongst other things:- abolition of automatic compensation for infl ation,- abolition of seven annual holidays,- the right to relocate workers inside the company if required by shift-schedule and overtime,- measures against absenteeism.In addition there was stepped-up state re-pression [the Cossiga law allowed for nine years of pre-trial confi nement], Calogero‘s

46

theorem, the collaboration of the PCI, massacres organised by the state ...

On Saturday the 7th of April 1979 Pad-ua‘s public prosecutor Calogero attacked in a blitz-like ac tion: dozens of people in Milan, Padua and Rome got arrested, all former members of Potere Op eraio and now militants of the Organised Workers‘ Autonomy. On Monday the 9th of April, the headline of ControLavoro read: ‚The election campaign has started‘, the elec-tions were meant to be held in May. The debates evolving around the arrests dealt with the question of how we should re act. We decided to take part in the informa-tion campaign concerning the 7th of April by establish ing one of the many 7th of April committees, and to carry on with our political work.

On the 21st of December 1979 the next wave of repression took place, with arrests in Milan, Rome, Padua and Ve-nice. This time we were directly affected, Augusto Finzi and other comrades got ar-rested. On the 24th of January the third blitz happened, with arrests in Milan, Novara, Como, Genoa and Venice, our comrade Gianni Sbrogiò amongst them. On the 29th of January the Red Brigades killed the vice-director of the Petrolchimico and the entire press linked our arrests with this murder. The same equation was made

some months later when the Red Brigades killed the boss of the anti-terrorism depart-ment in Venice. The media continued their public trial against us.: ControLavoro, Lavoro Zero and the COM2 publishing cooperative were accused of being the driving force behind the murders, and the arrested comrades were portrayed as terrorists.

The circle closed. We got crushed bet-ween the armed groups and state repres-sion. There was no space for the autono-mous struggle of the working class any more.

Nevertheless there could be an extra-ordinary fi nale for a story which had be-gun years earlier. Des pite all individual and collective attempts to edge them out of the historical picture, the mass work-ers — de-skilled, rootless, not respected, responsible for having disorientated the left-wing parties and their political models – constituted the driving force behind the intertwining of a great cycle of struggle for a different life in the factories and in society. "

47

Failure

In the early 1970s an important chap-ter in the history of class movement was closed; all processes of cent ralisation and elaboration of a party form which were adequate to the quality of the movement (not just those initiated by Potop) failed. It ought to be stressed that in 1968/69 all these attempts to make a revolutionary tension last were backed by a majority and had mass character. Their failure appears as a loss of social rep resentation of the ex-tra-parliamentary left, as its diaspora: but it is also a backwardness of the entire left in relation to the processes of de-composition of the class driven by capitalist restructuring on a world sca-le and in the developed centres. The offi cial workers‘ movement is incapab-le of consolidating its reform project as a response to capital‘s initiative.

Bianchini/Pergola, Preface to the reprint of Potere Operaio – Giornale Politico de-gli operai di Porto Marghera 1967-69,

Padua 1980

48

‚The workers should take things into their own hands‘

Excerpt from an interview with Gianni Sbrogiò about politics of representation and the attempt to implement the refusal of work inside the factory.

One of the most interesting bits in the in-terview with Augusto Finzi deals with your effort to organ ise yourselves without a poli-tical layer ...

This has always been our obsession. We managed to put this idea into practice by organising the Assemblea Autonoma. We were always obsessed with refusing rep-resentatives. We wanted the workers to refuse to hand over the responsibility to others, to the unions or the political Party. We did not want to hand them over to a structure that was different from us. This was our position, so our big political grief has always been, whether as Potere Opera-io, as the Porto Marghera workers‘ group or as the Autonomous Assembly of Porto Marghera, that in the end the workers would turn us into delegates. This has al-ways thrown us into crisis because we re-fused these politics of representa tion but in the end the workers wanted to see us in this position, as delegates. We wanted

these workers, who agreed on a minimum of debates and demands, to take things into their own hands, from A to Z, from the struggle to the drafting of demands.

But you did not always agree on this sub-ject. Germano Mariti talks very positively about the de partment delegates and about the factory council. He perceives them both as a conquest of the workers. Augusto Finzi, on the other hand, sees that the unions were able to use these bodies to re gain control over the struggles.

Yes, we had two hearts beating in our chests. The factory councils were establis-hed in Italy in 1969, at the end of a big cycle of struggles. Politically they were the institutional attempt of the unions to contain those struggles which developed outside of their organisation. For many workers who were organised in the uni-ons, the factory councils allowed them to debate with each other democratically.

49

The establishment of factory councils was a need of the rank-and-fi le and became a need of the leadership which in some way or the other had to modify the or-ganised level of workers‘ struggles. Potere Operaio was completely opposed, our po-sition was that the factory council was a structure in the hands of the unions and functional for them. In Marghera intensi-ve debates evolved around this issue. On one hand we saw the establishment of the factory council as an attempt to assimilate the factory struggles. On the other hand we noticed that the workers used it and therefore we accep ted this organism in order to say what we had to say, despite the fact that we ourselves had no in terest in being inside the factory council. To put it another way: we knew that once we got elected into the factory council (at Ammi Germano got elected as a department de-legate and I got elected as a representative of the white-collar workers) everthing de-pended on being organised outside of that body, in order to carry the so-called poli-tical line (which had been laid down ex-ternally), i.e. the choice of goals, into the council which would then adopt them.

Our political goal was to organise the autonomy of the working class. In the end,

the factory coun cil, which had been for-med as a democratic possibility to advance the workers‘ rank-and-fi le needs, became more and more an instrument of the uni-on apparatus. Some council members had to be uni on members, which initially had not been the case. When the three union federations agreed on a common deal an even more restrictive phase begun and the structure became even more bureaucrat ic. In the end all decisions were made by the council board whose aims rarely differed from the offi cial union line.

Refusal of health-damaging work

Why did it take such a long time in the Pe-trolchimico for struggles against the health damaging chemical production to erupt? At which point did the workers refuse to accept their fate? What kind of forms of struggle did they come up with?

We have to distinguish between the metal and the chemical industries. The danger that the metal worker is subjected to is much more visible and more imme-diate: ranging from dust to noise. For the chemical worker the danger is much more insidious. Here the health hazards were

50

uncovered later, partly due to the fact that they had been kept secret. A metalworker working in front of a fur nace knew what he had to fi ght against – noise, dirt, heat – and therefore it was possible to organise a struggle against it. Of course, the chemi-cal workers knew something, but caught between the low wage and the union which had addopted the bosses’ point of view they accepted the health hazard bo-nus. We were around during this phase. This is why we said: no, this kind of work is unaccept able! And we tried to express the line of the refusal of work, which came from Potere Operaio, this slogan, this pro-ject which we thought was indispensable. The worker had to put himself into this contradiction, he had to say: we have to produce, but how, what and when? And with these three questions we started the debate on the refusal of work.

No worker thought of us as idlers or of people who don’t want to work, because we said: ‚We work even more than you do, we work inside the factory like you do, after the work we go to the as sembly for three hours and after that we organise the struggles. We work much more than you!‘ The work which you are forced to do is one thing, the work which you choose to

do is another. You are forced to work on a low wage in a health-damaging environ-ment, therefore the refusal of work means starting to change the very organisation of work.

Within Potere Operaio we were often seen as the ‘right-wing’, because we talked about the refusal of work in a reformist, rather than a revolutionary way. Because we ‘took apart’ the refusal of work, becau-se we did not only talk about a struggle which was supposed to topple the system. We were seen as the ‘unionists’. Who knows, looking back from today’s pers-pective maybe we would have made good unionists if we had not chosen different paths, but in reality we often functioned as the critical consciousness of the union. We opened the eyes of the workers and demonstrated that it was possible to orga-nise in ways different from the unions.

Direct reduction of working time

How did you enforce the 36 hours week? Is it true that the workers had to work only six hours but could not go home afterwards, that they had to stay in the plant for another two hours? This was in the zinc electrolysis depart-

51

ment. This struggle was the attempt to put Potere Operaio‘s slogan into practice: reduction of the working-time as an ex-pression of the refusal or work and of the struggle against health-damaging work. A demand for the immediate improvement of the qual ity of life. We thought that the demand would go down best in those situ-ations where work was the most damaging and hard. This was in the zinc electrolysis department, where sheer zinc is produced by electrolysis from zinc oxide dissolved in sulphuric acid. In this department it was very damp, there were electro-magne-tic fi elds and sulphuric acid vapours. The zinc is produced in a system where cells fi lled with the solution are energised. The sheer zinc accumulates at the aluminium cathodes. Every day, the workers had the six-hour duty to strip the zinc off the ca-thodes. Afterwards the anodes had to be cleaned from encrustations, which took another hour and a half. We organised a medical check for the workers in these de-partments in order to show that the work was damaging. It became clear that a lot of workers had developed problems affecting their mouths, noses, throats and ears be-cause they were exposed to sulphuric acid and noise. We organised a struggle for the

re duction of work pressure through the re-duction of working hours. We chose very hard forms of struggle together with the workers who stopped stripping the catho-des. The management had to switch off the electricity and the machines stopped producing zinc. If the management had not switched of the electricity more and more zinc would have accumulated and fi nally destroyed the facility. This is why they were forced to stop the machines. This went on for some days, I think at some point the production lay idle for ten days in a row. We achieved the rule that the workers only had to strip the cathodes for six hours without having to knock off the anodes afterwards.

Previously they had had a break af-ter six hours of work and then cleaned the anodes for another hour and a half, which amounted to eight hours. After the struggle they worked only six hours, then went to catch lunch in the canteen and did not return back to work afterwards. The cleaning of the anodes was done by another group of workers which the em-ployer had to hire for this purpose. We fi nally put this down in a department level agreement which offi cially did not exist because the uni on did not support

52

the demand. But then the union decided to sign the contract after all and it be came offi cial. The union did not want to make the achievement public. We, in contrast, tried to make it known by all means ima-ginable.

Until 1975 the workers sat in the can-teen and played cards, but they were not allowed to leave the factory. Therefore we organised a struggle for the right to leave the factory. The form of struggle was to leave after lunch without punch-ing out. The management posted letters of dismissal, justify ing it by the fact that the workers had left their work place be-fore end of shift. At this point the uni on had to intervene. In the end, the solu-tion was that on bank holidays workers were allowed to leave one hour earlier, on normal working days half an hour earlier. The employer had to hire new workers to clean the anodes. It remained that way as long as I worked in the plant, until I got arres ted in 1980. After that they somehow restructured things. "

53

APPENDIX

`Processo Petrolchimico‘ – The trial against Montedison and Enichem

Gabriele Bortolozzo, born 1934 in Cam-palto close to Venice, was a chemical worker at the Porto Marghera Petrocl-himico for 35 years. In the 70s he learned of the cancer risk in PVC production and noticed that more and more of his colleagues were dying of cancer. Soon afterwards he started his investigation. In a survey conducted in the department that polymerises MVC (monomerical vi-nyl chloride) in autoclaves and so turns it into PVC, he counted 149 workers dead and more than 500 suffering from cancer. From 1985 onwards he worked with the magazine Medicina Democratica which published his report on the deaths in the petrochemical industry in 1994. Bortolozzo re peatedly took action to point to the deadly threat. He also fi led numer-ous charges.

The chemical trade union FULC de-famed Bortolozzo as a spy paid for by

overseas competitors to harm the Italian industry with his investigation.

Bortolozzo’s action received committed support from prosecutor Casson, a PCI member who had previously investigated the Gladio affair. When an announce-ment was published in Venice’s two daily newspapers asking all the sick and the be-reaved relatives to get in touch to report medical his tories and working conditions, new evidence continued to come to light and 507 people joined the action.

Bortolozzo did not live to see the ope-ning of the trial. On the 12 September 1995 he died in a car accident.

The trial of 31 top managers, including the leadership of the Italian chemical in-dustry, began in March 1998. The charge: ‘negligent causing of mass mortality’ and ‘being responsible for an envir onmental catastrophe‘ by disposing of dioxin and

54

other poisonous chemical waste in the waters and surroundings of Venice.

Only a few weeks after beginning of the trial the company bosses admitted parti-al responsibility and offered a 30 million settlement to the bereaved relatives of the MVC victims. Many accepted the settle-ment, as they did not want to wait their whole lives for payouts, as in the cases of Vajont and Seveso. Apart from the Italian state, the local authorities, trade unions and associations like the democratic phy-sicians only 15 people continued to pur-sue their claim, amongst them Gabriele Bor tolozzo‘s sons.

In the address by the counsel, the pro-secutor found all of the 28 accused con-victable of several homicides through negligence and of an outrage against the environment. Casson demanded 12 years imprisonment for each of Eugenio Cefi s, former president of ENI and Montedison, Alberto Grandi, former CEO of Monte-dison and vice president of Montefi bre, and professor Emilio Barta lini, head of Montedison‘s central health service. He demanded 185 years imprisonment in to-tal for all of the accused.

Against all expectations, the accused were acquitted by the court on the 2nd

of November 2001. The court dismissed all evidence which had been presented and gave as grounds for the verdict that in the early 70s, when the deaths started, the accused could not have known of the production’s deadly impact on the wor-kers. Outraged, the joint plaintiffs fi led an appeal together with prosecutor Casson.

The second trial commenced in the win-ter of 2003/04, ending on December 15th with a ruling ac quitting the accused of the main points of the prosecution. A few were convicted to a sentence of one and a half years on probation.

In the civil proceedings a few workers managed to receive compensations of va-rious amounts. "

All facts about the trials: http://www.petrolchimico.it/

There is a documentary feature about Bortolozzo‘s struggle against Montedison:

Porto Marghera – un inganno letale

(Porto Marghera - a deadly deceit)

55

The production process of PVC

Monomeric vinyl chloride was polyme-rised into PVC in autoclaves. At Porto Marghera, obsolete working methods ex-posed the workers to cancer risk. Whoever had to clean MVC residues off the sealable air-and-steam-tight production vats and then fi ll the MVC into bags would feel ‚as though walking on clouds‘ for several days afterwards. On some days the con-centration of chlorine gas was so high that the workers, who already had a sweet taste in their mouths from the gas, could only break the windows of the department. Despite this, no money was invested in less dangerous equip ment, and there was even an instruction to maintain the old, decrepit machines ‚as little as possible‘, so as not to disturb production.

The individual chemical companies arranged amongst themselves to hush up the MVC risk. The or ganisation of work must not be challenged. Thus the affec-ted workers were diagnosed wrongly with contagious diseases and left in the dark about the danger inherent in the objects they were working with. Numerous tu-mourous affl ictions and deaths were the consequence.

The contamination of the lagoon

During the trial, the excesses of the past came to the surface, the harmful produc-tion process, clouds of toxic gas, illegal toxic-waste dumps and transports, the discharge of toxic sewage into the lagoon, the contamination of the ground water. 500,000 tons of a poisonous cocktail of dioxin, lead, mer cury, and arsenic have destroyed one of the most beautiful la-goons in Europe. 80 million cubic metres of industrial waste, equivalent to twice the capacity of the lagoon, was simply dumped into the sea. Another fi ve million cubic metres of waste was dumped on the land. When toxic dumps were discove-red on the factory premises twelve years ago, the company proceeded to limit the damage by simply levelling a dump and covering it with ash. Subsequently a he-licopter airfi eld for then-manager Raul Gardini was built on top of it. "

Information about the lagoon: http://www.salve.it/uk/eco/default.htm

56

The dioxin cloud over SevesoSaturday, 10th of July 1976, Seveso, on the outskirts of Milan. The chemical factory Icmesa with 153 em ployees is a subsidiary company of the Swiss chemical compa-ny Hoffmann-La Roche. A reactor producing trichlorophenol heats up, and large quantities of dioxin escape. Only a few maintenance and temporary workers are inside the factory. The toxic cloud disseminates invisibly.

Production continued for 10 days afterwards until management admitted that a very dangerous substance had leaked from the reactor and that the surroundings might be contaminated. During these days animals of all kinds died in large num-bers. The dioxin caused breathing diffi culties and then chlorine acne in the inhabit-ants of the surrounding municipalities. Eventually a wide area was closed off and a large part of the popula tion was evacuated. Some of the incompetent authorities’ emergency measures even increased the damage done to nature and to humans. In the end, pregnant women were allowed to abort; back then abortion was still strict-ly forbidden in Italy. The workers‘ group of the neighbouring Montedison factory in Castellanza con tacted the workers in Seveso immediately. A people’s committee was established, in order to reveal the causes of the accident and to call those re-sponsible to account. The magazine Sapere published an extens ive report that same year. All the experts were excluded from the state’s crisis management. The Icmesa trial dragged on for years, ending in 1987 with acquittal on almost all counts. The incidents of Seveso made clear the recklessness of chemical factories’ production and that the workers have to take the struggle against health damage into their own hands.

Ludwigshafen-OppauLarge chemical accidents also occurred in Germany – for example the long-forgot-ten explosion of a BASF factory in Ludwigshafen-Oppau on the 21st of September 1921, which cost 561 lives and erased an entire district.

57

The new chemicals industry directive and the German unions

“The German Trade Union Federation and the chemical union IGBCE protes-ted against a tightening of EU chemi-cals legislation. In a letter to all Ger-man members of the EU parliament, they advocate the implementa tion of the compromise reached in parliament and the dismissal of further-reaching attempts by the environmental commis-sion. The unions said the commission‘s approach diverged greatly from the agreed compromises and would en-danger jobs in the chemical industry.

The criticism was levelled for ex-ample at the intention to ban and replace dangerous substances. Accor-ding to the letter this was not always possible or necessary, as some of the-se substances could be handled safely and without danger. Furthermore, they would go on to exist on the EU market through the importation of ready-made products from non-EU countries.“

(Frankfurter Rundschau, 2 Nov. 2006)

The EU parliament is currently (Novem-ber 2006) debating a stricter standard for the chemicals in dustry, because the risks of many of the 30 000 chemical substances which have been used in the EU for many years are largely unknown. Last year the chemicals industry prevailed, imposing a ‘compromise between economic effi cien-cy and environmentalism’. According to these terms the standard should become less bureaucratic and most importantly it should not burden the European indus-try unduly in the international competi-tion. The environmental commission in the meantime has made the draft a tar-get for attack. Especially controversial is the banning of dangerous chemic als for which alternatives exist, even where cost to the industry is increased.

The environmental commission has dismissed exceptions for Airbus, which fi reproofs its passenger seats with chemi-cal substances. The leader of the CDU/EPP parliamentary group fears a ‚disaster‘ if Airbus will have to test these products time-consumingly and then possibly have to do without them. (cf. Stuttgarter Zeitung, 11 October 06) "

58

The struggle is worth it!

Speech by Gianni Sbrogiò in March 2006 at the University of Padua as part of a se-minar on the workers‘ fi ght against death caused by asbestos. Workers from Porto Marghera and Sesto San Gio vanni were present on the podium. In Italy the use of asbestos was only prohibited from 1992 (Ger many: 1993, U.K.: 1985 outlawing of amphibole asbestos). Workers‘ deaths from the malignant tu mor mesothelioma, which grows in the pleura, peritonea or pericardium, continue. Cases are ex-pected to peak between 2010 and 2015. It is hard to diagnose this illness early and it almost always ends fatally. The workers concerned were working with asbestos mostly in the ‚70s: at Eternit, Breda (ship-building), in train construction and at the Petrolchimico.

I want to read to you a few sentences from the fl yers we made back then.

November 1972, analysis of the wor-king conditions at the factory: ”It emerges from the new meetings of the new departments at Petrolchimico 2 that

the conditions when compared to the al-ready dramatically bad situation at the old plant are terrible. Everything is there: health hazard, huge workloads, noise and authoritarian conditions. A brief over-view over the work conditions in the new departments:

TDI (phosgene production): already 150 poisoned workers at the end of 1972.

At the CR department the noise and vi-brations caused by the huge compressors are unbearable. After eight hours of work, the workers lose their sense of balance.

At the DL department, where perchlo-roethylene is produced, 70 people have already been poisoned. In August, a cloud of chloride from the CS department,

59

where chloride and caustic soda are pro-duced by electrolysis, covered all of Porto Marghera.“

The autonomous assembly of Porto Mar-ghera wrote in 1974: ”The workers do not go to the factory to conduct inquiry but because they are forced to. Work is not a way of life, but the necessity of sell-ing oneself so as to survive. By fi ghting against work, against the coercion to sell ourselves, we offend against all rules of society. And by fi ghting for less work, so as not to die of poisoning through work any more, we fi ght against health haz-ards. Because it damages one‘s health to get up every morning and go to work, it is harmful to keep to the work cycles, to the methods of production, it is harmful to do shift work, it is harmful to go home with a wage that forces you to go back to the factory the next day.“

And then, in March 1975 the collective against health-damaging production wrote a pamphlet and printed it together with other factory groups, in which they notifi ed the population and workers of the constant, i.e. 24/7, emission of vinyl chloride, a cancer-causing gas all over the areas of Mar ghera, Mestre and Venice. At the time, 4000 kilogrammes daily were emitted, that‘s 3000 kilo grammes per in-

habitant per year in the municipality of Venice.

In this situation the union asked for more money for the workers – it wanted to solve this problem by means of hazard pay only. The hazard was already ob-vious back then and it still is now, as in many factories it has by no means been solved. We said it can‘t be done like that. You can‘t just take a little bit more money and leave everything as it was. We inven-ted slogans, aiming to ask how work in the factory could be organised differently from the way we have to endure it now. We said: an end to health hazard pay and we tried independently to fi nd out how we could organise in order to spend less time at the factory.

At the Petrolchimico the workers organised for themselves different working hours in an obstinate, precise and concrete man-ner outside of and without the union. The work at the Petrolchimico was organised in shifts, just like today. And in order to spend less time at the factory the workers made a shift plan as a form of struggle, consisting of fi ve instead of four shifts. So that one only had to work 36, rather than 40 hours. Thus the contractor had to fi nd other workers during the week, in or der to fi ll the remaining jobs. This struggle went on for a good while, then it receded. In

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other factories we were able to win the re-duction of working hours permanently. At Ammi the workers in zinc production had organised themselves and pushed through to work six, rather than eight hours a day, with the same pay, of course.

Absenteeism

Another thing we wanted to defend was the workers‘ very spontaneous work atti-tude back then – but I think it still exists today: absenteeism. In order to protect oneself against intensifi cation of la bour, the hours, the endangering of health and against this unbearable organisation of work, the workers stayed at home and used illness as a spontaneous form of defence against the hazardous nature of work. As the Autonomous Assembly we published a small pamphlet explaining how we needed to organise so that the absentee worker could not be punished. The contractor and the health insurances would send examining doctors to check whether the worker was really ill. And we or ganised a kind of `red aid‘, as a way of pre-empting the bosses‘ repressive action against this spon taneous struggle. We were supported in this by a few lawy-er comrades, who defended any sacked abenteeist workers for free. Obviously the-se were very defensive forms of struggle

against the en dangering of health. It was more important to avoid the health hazard of the factory completely. That‘s why, via a departmental committee, we contacted work medicine in Padua. Doctor comra-des from there then undertook investiga-tions in the factory for their research and we used the doctors to inform the workers of all kinds of problems they had at work. Our demand: closure of the plant, sani-tation according to the technical-scientifi c state-of-the-art, re-opening of the plant. Wages were to be guaranteed during the whole closure time.

My question is now: is the situation to-day really so different from the one back then? Yes, the de veloped countries have made sure that all noxious work is outsour-ced to the underdeveloped coun tries. At the same time, capital has made use of precarious and illegal employment to take working conditions backwards in many sectors. Therefore not all that much has changed. But it seems to me that the will to struggle has diminished. A lot of peo-ple think the working class‘ problems can be solved in other ways, but you young people can experience for yourselves how work is getting more and more precarious – if there is any – and how conditions have worsened. Wage rises don‘t even cover infl ation any more.

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The struggle is worth it!

I think one of the main reasons for today‘s situation is that they somehow managed to persuade us that struggling doesn‘t pay off! But I think the contrary is true: strug-gling does pay off! I want to emphasise another thing: capital has developed be-cause there was a workers‘ struggle. In re-ality, each form of struggle, each demand by the workers leads to a jump in the de-velopment of capital, clearly accompanied by an improvement of the workers‘ living conditions. There is always the other side of the coin: in a certain way the boss suc-ceeds in capturing the workers‘ struggle in order to in crease his power or somehow to keep hold of it, and the working class – even if the term is a bit out of fashion today – succeeds by struggling to improve its living conditions. Surely our living condi-tions are not only a quantitative but also a qualitative issue. I am convinced that it can only be im proved by joining forces, establishing aims and forms of struggle through which power can be taken form the bosses. "

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The refusal of work

Porto Marghera Workers‘ Committee

(1970)

In 1973, Merve Publishers in Berlin published Toni Negri‘s small book Die Krise des Plan-Staats. Kommunis mus und revolutionäre Organisation. Its appendix contains texts by Ferruccio Gambino (Gegen den Fab rikismus, für politischen Lohn), by the Porto Marghera Workers‘ Committee and by Augusto Finzi.

We are reprinting the text by the Workers’ Committee because here workers formulate the central claims of operaismo:– workers’ struggle is immediately political struggle, i.e. a struggle for power;– workers are forced to work in order to control them;– workers are a special force and stand against society in its entirety.

We did not have space here for Augusto Finzi’s text from 1972 in which he argues for the formation of Politic al Committees and which served as material for the debate on the nation congress of Potere Operaio. You can read it [in German] at wildcat-www.de.If you have read it you will understand better what Augusto Finzi had in mind with his self-critique of ‘sectari anism’ in the long interview which is in the DVD as a special feature.

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What does it mean to destroy the po-wer of the bosses? Who are the bosses and what do they want? These questions seem stupid but really they are fundamen-tal if we want to lay down our political line against work. First of all we have to say that the common sense claim that the bosses exploit the workers in order to enrich themselves is wrong. Of course this is true but the wealth of the bosses is in no proportion to their power. Agnelli for example would have to walk around dressed in gold in proportion to the cars he produces, but instead he settles for a boat and a private aeroplane, something the boss of a much more modest factory than Fiat could also afford. What Agnelli wants is to keep and develop his power, and this coincides with the development and growth of capital ism. Capitalism is an impersonal force and capitalists act as its functionaries. Actually, capitalism does not even need capitalists any more. In Russia, for eample, there is capitalism although there are no capitalists. The exis-tence of capitalism in Russia is revealed by the existence of profi t. It is probably distributed “more justly“ but the commu-nist revolution does not aim at making the distribution of social profi t more just, it aims at overturning the very capitalist re-lations of production which create profi t. A social system that ensures that people

are forced to work must be overturned. In this sense the experiences of the Chinese and Cuban revolutions have to be taken into account as well.

More than anything it is in the nature of capitalism to try to conserve this power relation against the working class and to use its development to strengthen this power more and more. This means that all the machines, the technological inno-vations, the development of industries, just as the under development of certain areas, are used to control the working class politically. By now, there are classi-cal examples of this capitalist behaviour; the introduction of the conveyor belt in the 1920s, for example, was a response to the revolutionary wave which shook the world in the years imme diately after the First World War. They wanted to get rid of the kind of skilled working class which had made the Russian revolution of 1917 and the factory councils movement all over Europe possible. The conveyor belt deskilled all workers, pushing back the revolutionary wave and even changing the appearance of class struggle; in many countries, all this led to a defi nite politi-cal defeat because there in the absence of any political organisation able to adapted its intervention to the new type of workers‘ behaviour.

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Now however, this technical structure has turned against capital by producing a massifi cation of wage demands, and one of the main reasons for that is the fl at struc-ture of the cycle of production. Capital is therefore revolutionising this structure, and in the meantime it tries to get rid of wor-kers and to create much wider wage diffe-rentials than currently exist, by introducing automation literally as a political attack on the working class.

In the United States, this manoeuvre has already taken place, and the only reason the bosses haven‘t repeated it in Italy is that they aren‘t sure they can con-trol the workers‘ response to the attack. This shows that progress, the development much fl aunted by the bosses, is nothing but an ongoing at tempt to adapt the or-ganisation of collective capital to working class attack. Technological progress is never neutral or inevitable, as the bosses and the unions have told us it is every time there is talk of redundancies caused by the introduction of new machines. Exactly because they believe in the fairytale of the neutrality of science, the unions limit those struggles to the defence of jobs and nev-er approach the problem from the point of view of the reduction of the working day. They believe or pretend to believe that the bosses are telling the truth: that the introduction of some machine in some

department means that there is work for only let‘s say 100 out of 200 workers and that the rest will have to go as victims of an inevitable progress.

But the workers have a completely dif-ferent logic: according to them, the intro-duction of the afore mentioned machine could mean that instead of 100 people working 8 hours there might very well be 200 people working 4 hours. Apart from making it more bearable to remain in the factory this logic would also solve the problem of unemployment. Thus the workers are not against the machines but against those who use the machines to im-pose work on them. Some people say that work is neces sary. We reply that the sheer amount of accumulated science (see for example the missions to the moon) is such that work can immediately be reduced to a merely peripheral aspect of human life, rather being conceived as the ”very reason of human existence“. Some peo-ple say that man has al ways worked. We reply that according to the Bible the earth is fl at and the sun revolves around it. Be-fore Galilei, this was reality, it had always been like this, it was the scientifi c point of view. But rather than giving scientifi c dem-onstrations the problem is revolutionising the current social order and asserting the interest of those who have materially cre-ated the conditions which make a better

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society than the currently existing one pos-sible.

Therefore the workers need to create an organisation which is capable of fi ghting back against the bosses‘ political control, capable of taking all the power necessary to make class interests triumph. Right now everything is useful for the bosses and their mechanisms of power, from science to workers‘ struggle itself if it does not really aim at destroying the relations of production, that is, at escaping from the political control of the bosses.

The bosses are even willing to spend mo-ney to control the workers politically and keep their power. In America, they are the ones who are going against ‚progress‘. For example, some factories where wor-ker numbers had been reduced through automation were forced to return to old productive sys tems to re-employ workers, under massive pressure from the struggles in led mostly in America by the black un-employed. Obviously this doesn‘t mean the black unemployed had aimed for this result, but it shows how the bosses are using science to exercise political cont-rol over the working class. The bosses‘ behaviour shows two things: fi rstly, that progress is not neutral at all, that it is de-cided exclusively from the point of view of politically controlling the forces that might

curtail capitalist power; secondly, that this control is exercised mainly through work; in fact there was no way the bosses of these American factories would have re-duced the working day for all in order to give work to the newly employed. They kept up the old working day even at the price of going back to working conditions which had existed before the automation of the plant. Thus capital is willing to go back, to build technically superseded ma-chinery just to control the workers politi-cally; to this end it is even willing to pay people whose work is completely void. This is where the question of the refusal of work becomes central. With the current development of machines, it is possible to work much less, provided that the machi-nes invented by modern science do not become the exclusive monopoly of the United States and the Soviet Union as cur-rently happens, but are instead available for use throughout the world. We need to impose the workers‘ logic according to which many machines should be invented in order to reduce the working day more and more, tendentially making it disap-pear. The workers‘ needs are communist needs.

At this point we cannot speak of soci-alism any more. Socialism is what exists in the Soviet Union, a new organisation of work, but this is not what the workers

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want. The workers want to work less and less until anything which effectively means coercion to work disappears. It is not true that in this society we are free. We are free to get up to go to work every morning. ‚If you don‘t work you don‘t eat!‘ Is this freedom? There is one thing which restricts our freedom: work. In reality, we are forced to work. The saying according to which work ennobles is an inven tion of the bosses. When all people are free from the need to work because there is enough for them to eat, dress and satisfy their pri-mary desires, then there will be real free-dom! We claim that already now, with the existing machines, it would be possible to realise many of those things which seem like science fi ction when we talk about them like this. In the CV 16 department, for instance, dur ing the last `collective agreement‘ strikes of 1969, management kept the autoclaves running by using new instruments for the automatic operation of the facilities. The workers were at home and the fa cilities kept producing. On that occasion, the bosses wanted to show they were stronger, so they didn‘t care if they delegitimised all their talk about the need for human labour. In the Montedison nitra-te plant they are using an electronic com-puter which automatically runs the ammo-nia produc tion facilities: there too they are

trying to raise productivity without any thought of reducing the working day. In plants like these it is much easier to show that the interest of the system is in using work as a form of political control over the workers. As a matter of fact, there are very few manual operations and very little psychological stress involved; all that is left is the physical presence of the worker next to the machine, the capitalist violence which wants humans to be conditioned to and enslaved by the machine.

But which are the means to abolish all this? The goal is to break the control me-chanism which cap ital has subordinated workers to. Workers are against society in its entirety, they are different from all the others because society in its entirety is structured against them and has even perfected itself as an answer to the move-ments of the working class. As we have seen, the struggle of the working class is actually the most important driving force for the development of capitalism. Think of the French May where the small fac-tories fell into crisis: this crisis contribut-ed to the concentration of capital and to the development of monopolies. Think of the USSR where the 1917 revolution has accelerated capitalist development so much that a backward country like czarist Russia could be come one of the strongest capitalist countries in the world. Thus, ca-

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pital is a power which repro duces itself independently of the volition of single indi-viduals; therefore, abolishing capital does not mean abolishing private property but destroying the relation of production itself, it means to destroy the need to work.

Nobody can say what concrete effects this revolution will entail. Even less can we answer the ques tion of those who ask us with what we want to replace that which we want to destroy. This is not the problem. In none of the great revolutions in history did people know beforehand with what they were going to replace that which they were about to tear down, because in revolutionary times the characters of peo-ple, the relationships between the classes change so radically that it is impossible to establish any historical hypothesis.

In order to abolish capitalism, the wor-kers will have to change human history much more pro foundly and radically than the French revolution, therefore it is im-possible to predict what will hap pen after-wards. Rather, what is important now is to see how we can destroy the existing. "

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Participants in the events

Augusto FinziBorn 1941 in Venice to Jewish parents who took him to safety in a refugee camp in Switzerland after the armistice on the 8th of September 1943, when the Nazis expanded Jewish deportation policies to Italy. After the liberation he returned to Venice. He graduated as a technician in 1960 from the Institute Pacinotti in Mest-re. He then worked for 18 years as tech-nician at the Petrol chimico, also at the department for PVC production CV6. Initially he sympathised with the PSIUP and was a member of the CGIL.

In 1967 he discovered at the company’s library an article published in Chemical Abstracts, which confi rmed that the pro-duction of MVC had been classifi ed as cancer-causing in Russia in 1946. Thus began his lifelong campaign against death caused by the chemicals industry and the senseless ness of capitalism. During the confl ict about the “harmonized“ labour agreement after Edison’s takeover of Mon-tecatini, Finzi went from being a lone crit-ical lone thinker to being a workers’ lead-

er and organiser. After his expulsion from the trade union he helped build Potere Operaio in Mar ghera. In 1972 he played a decisive role in the temporary fusion of Potere Operaio and Il Manifesto in Politi-cal commitees. Later again he was involved in the fusion of Lotta Continua and the workers’ co-ordination in the Autonomous Assembly of Porto Marghera. He was aim-ing for a new form of workers’ organisa-tion without separate political leadership.

Finzi was co-publisher of the workers’ newspapers Lavoro Zero and ControLavoro.

He left the Petrolchimico in 1978 with no other work lined up. On the 21st of December 1979 he was arrested in the course of the 7th of April investigations. He was held on remand for two years and eight months. He was eventually convic-ted, and a day-release prisoner for a few months after the trial.

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From the 80s onwards, Finzi had been increasingly interested in herbal medi-cine and healthy food. He founded the club Amina – friends of nature – in 1997. He gave talks and held courses on herbal medicine.

Finzi took part in the court cases against the Petrolchimico. After 10 years of court proceedings, it was established on the 7th of April 2004 that he had been made ill by asbestos, but the company was not held responsible for the deadly tumour which killed Finzi in June 2004. He left behind nu merous pamphlets from back then as well as his own notes on the workers‘ or-ganisation in Porto Marghera, which now form the basis for the ‘workers’-archive’ which has been named after him.

Italo SbrogiòBorn 1934 in Favaro on the Venetian ‘mainland’. He started to work in the Porto Marghera indus trial zone in the 50s and later worked for Petrolchimico. Member of the PCI. He was voted into the Commissione Interna in 1960 via the CGIL. Later he took a PCI seat on the city council of Venice, where he was the only worker. The party even talked of sending him into parliament in Rome.

In 1964 he fi rst came into contact with intellectuals in Veneto (Negri, Cacciari, Bianchini), who in troduced a new kind of debate, diametrically opposed to the PCI’s, where the apparatus passed the political line downwards, expecting obe-dience. Sbrogiò left the PCI in 1967 and started building the group Potere Operaio at Petrolchimico, together with Finzi and Massa. In 1967 they published their fi rst fl yer and their fi rst newspaper. He was ex-pelled from the union in June 1969.

Within Potere Operaio he was a strict exponent of the workers’ line. In 1995 he published a book about his history and Porto Marghera. As part of the 7th of April he was investigated for several years, but fi nally acquitted during the trial. He is one of the founders of the Augusto Finzi‘ workers‘ archive.

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Germano MaritiBorn 1936 in Venice. His father ran a grocery store, where he helped out. He “escaped“ from a car penter‘s apprentice-ship into the zinc factory at the age of 19; initially this was liberating compared to his previous personal dependencies. He worked in the electroplating shop. In 1969 Gianni Sbro giò started working as an accountant at the same company; he was already a member of the political com-mittee of Potere Operaio at this time. As a non-union member, Mariti was elected to the fi rst factory council at Ammi in 1970. Activist at the Autonomous Assembly of Porto Marghera. When his comrades were already in prison he continued to publish ControLavoro until 1981. In the course of the 7th of April he was being investigated for many years, and it was only in 1993

that he was fi nally fully acquitted. Today he is active in the rent struggle and in Solo l‘inizio, an association that runs a food co-op and organises political events. He is a co-founder of the ‘Augusto Finzi‘ workers‘ archive.

Gianni SbrogiòBorn 1946 in Favaro in the Venetian hin-terland. Higher education was out of reach and he enrolled in the business school, so as at least to be able to become a white collar employee rather than a blue col-lar worker. In 1962 he was employed by the COIN department store group chain. In 1964, when he was 19, he was made manager of a sewing department with women – a role which soon made him feel uncomfortable. He started attend-ing evening school in 1966 and gained an accountancy de gree in 1967. He was a member of the PCI in his hometown, where his brother Lino led the divi sion. He experienced the student movement of 1968 mostly through reading L’Unità and through the debates in the local PCI sec-tion, where slogans such as “be wary of provocations“ were spread. He joined his brother Italo’s group in Porto Marghera late. He felt close to the struggling wor-

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kers and no longer wanted to stand “on the outside“. There was also a strike at COIN in 1969 – he was the only white collar employee to take part and the wor-kers called him “the foreman who was also on strike“ from then on. He left the PCI after its national congress in 1969. At the end of the same year he was employed by Ammi (formerly Monteponi Montevecchio). Together with Germano Mar iti they built their own factory committee. Produced fl yers against health-damaging work.

In the course of the investigations of the 7th of April he was arrested on the 24th of January 1980, charged with “forming an armed gang“ and “attempted robbery“ at Ammi.

In the nick he met lots of old comrades. Together with non-political prisoners they fought for better conditions in the prison.

In 1983 he took part in the initiative for dissociation from the armed struggle and was relocated to Rebibbia (Rome). He was sentenced to a long period of impri-sonment in 1984, but because of the long time he’d already been on remand the sen-tence was fi nally halved. Only by means of a hunger strike was he fi nally able to bring about his release on bail after four and a half years of imprisonment. Bruno MassaTechnician at Petrolchimico, member of the Workers’ committee of Potere Operaio. Af-ter the struggles of 1968 he was punished with transferral to a factory in Abruzzo. He resigned and worked as librarian at the university of Venice. He joined the PSIUP, an organisation close to il manifesto, and later the PCI. Died 2003.

Guido BianchiniBorn 1926 in Verona, he was one of Italy’s youngest partisans. He lived in Ferrara and Padua. At the end of the 50s he was a member of the PSI, where he met Neg-ri and Quaderni Rossi. Co-founder of the Potere Operaio Veneto Classe Operaia edi-torial group. He was involved in opera ismo from the earliest beginnings and earned

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his money as pharmaceuticals salesman for a long time, until he found a job as a technician at the university of Padua; si-multaneously, he did workers’ inquiries in Veneto and Emilia-Romagna. He was one of the people already distributing fl yers out side the Petrolchimico in 1964. In the early 1970s, in Quaderni del Progetto, he introduced things like the diffuse factory and the socialized worker (operaio sociale) into the discussion. He was ar rested in the course of the 7th of April 1979 and 1980. While in prison he graduated in chemist-ry. He was acquitted in the trial. Bianchini died in 1998 in Padua.

Antonio NegriBorn 1933. Became a member of the PSI-left in Padua, edited its weekly paper Il Progresso Veneto. In the editorial groups of Quaderni Rossi, Classe Operaia, and Potere Operaio. Temporary chair man of the nati-onal organisation of Potere Operaio.

In 1967 he became professor at the Institute of Political Science in Padua. Arrested on the 7th of April 1979 and charged with forming an armed gang and high treason. Released after being elected to parliament on the Radical Party list. Escaped to Paris, where he was tolerated

by the Socialist government, along with many other exiles from Italy, and worked as lecturer at the university. In 1997 he returned to Italy and was arrested again. Spent some time in prison and then lived freely in Rome. Today he lives in Venice.Numerous publications, including many available in English. Today he is well-known mostly be cause of the book Empire, which he wrote with Michael Hardt.

Massimo CacciariBorn 1944 in Venice. Philosopher and currently mayor of Venice. He was a mem-ber of Potere Op eraio and then joined the PCI. In the 70s he was in charge of the in-dustry commission of the PCI in Venice. Between 1976 and 1983 a member of parliament in Rome, and also member of the industry committee. After the death of PCI leader Berlinguer, Cacciari left the party and joined more moder ate currents of the centre-left-coalition. Politically he now belongs to the Margherita (‚Daisy‘) alli ance of parties. Mayor of Venice from 1993 until 2000 and again since 2005.

In the 1970s he became known in the German-speaking world for his essay Qualifi kation und Klassenbewusstsein, pub lished in 1970 by Verlag Neue Kritik

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in Frankfurt, and for Bologna/Cacciari Zusammensetzung der Arbeiterklasse und Organisationsfrage, published by Merve in 1973.

Nerone PiccoloWorker at Breda, member of CGIL and PCI.Giorgio BrazzolottoWorker at the SAVA aluminium factory. Member of the CGIL.

Ferruccio BrugnaroBorn in 1936 in Mestre, worked in Porto Marghera since the 1950s. Active in the factory council. In 1965 started distribu-ting poems as leafl ets to the workers. Ber-telli made songs out of some of them.

Gabriele BortolozzoBorn 1934. Employed at the Petrolchimico for 32 years. An activist against the deadly work in the factory since the 1970s. He set in motion the legal case against the management of the Petrol chimico. He died in a car accident in 1995. The court opened the case in 1998.The young workers discussing over the kitchen table, fought (in vain) against the closure of their department, CAPRO-LATTAME in Petrolchimico. They are uni-onists and members of left parties.

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GlossaryDC – Democrazia Cristiana. Christian De-mocratic Party.

PCI – Partito Comunista Italiano. Italian Communist Party. Today DS – Democratici di Sinistra (Left Democrats).

PSI – Partito Socialista Italiano, Socialist Party.

PSIUP – Partito Socialista Italiano d‘Unità Proletaria, Italian Socialist Party of Prole-tarian Unity, left splinter group of the PSI. Existed from 1964 until 1972 and played an important role in the workers struggles 1968/69 in Valdagno and at Fiat.

CGIL – Confederazione Generale Italia-na del Lavoro. Formerly communist union confederation.

CISL – Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori. Christian union confederation.

UIL – Unione Italiana del Lavoro. Right wing, social democratic union confede-ration.

FIOM – Federazione Italiania Operai Me-talmeccanici. Metal workers union of the CGIL.

CISNAL – Confederazione Italiana Sinda-cati Nazionali dei Lavoratori. Union con-federation close to the fascist MSI party. Today renamed to UGL.

Commissione Interna – Internal Commissi-on. Union shop stewards in the company, elected by all employees. Re-introduced in 1943 with the legal right to sign collec-tive contracts with individual companies; which they then lost in 1947. At the end of the 1960s they were replaced by the depart ment representatives and the facto-ry councils.

Consiglio di Fabbrica – Factory Council. The election (and retraction) of depart-ment representat ives which was practiced during the 1969/69 struggles was then taken up by the unions to create a new

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representation structure in the company, which replaced the Commissione Interna. The work ers statute of 1970 gave the right to union representation in the workplace (RSA), but does not dic tate a particular form: this is left up to the union itself. In 1993 the three union confederations uni-ted over the election of `unifi ed union representation‘ (RSU). Two thirds of the members were voted directly from a list, one third of the places were allocated to the unions, who had signed the collective contract.

Il Manifesto – The Manifesto. Oppositio-nal group inside the PCI around Rossana Rossanda and Lu cio Magri, who were also members of parliament. In June 1969 the fi rst edition of their newspaper Il Ma-nifesto appeared, in December 1969 they

were thrown out of the party. Since 1971 Il Mani festo has been published as a daily paper. In 1974 they merged with the Par-ty of Proletarian Unity PdUP. Il Manifesto‘s 1970 `Theses on communism‘ were also discussed widely in West Ger many.

Lotta Continua – Permanent Struggle. Biggest extra-parliamentary group of the radical left, foun ded in 1969 from a split in the worker-student movement in Turin, which had massively supported the strike at Fiat. LC did neighbourhood work under the slogan ‚Let‘s take the city‘. Dissolved in 1976. Published a daily newspaper of the same name that ran until 1982.

Classe Operaia – Working class. Political newspaper, formed by the `interventionist‘ wing of the Quaderni Rossi. Published from 1964 to 1967.

Quaderni Rossi – Red Notebooks. A news-paper stated in Turin in 1961 by Panz ieri, who had taken part in the workers inquiry. The operaism tendency came out of this paper.

Comitato Operaio di Porto Marghera – Porto Marghera Workers‘ Committee. Formed by the Potere Operaio group in Venice, i.e. those workers who had taken up contact with the intellectuals from Potere

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Operaio, in order to bring Potop‘s politi-cal line into the factories. There were also oth er workers in the Committee, some of them belonged to the workers groups in the Petrolchimico or at Ammi. They ne-ver went to Potop‘s national meetings, but they knew that there was this connec-tion. The Committee had its own meeting place, which was open to the public af-ter the shift. The discussions were about concrete struggles and demands. In the beginning the discussions were open to ‚externals‘: those who were not directly involved in the struggles, but rather sym-pathized with Potop and had other jobs. In those times there was a more movement like atmosphere. The ac tual responsible work however remained on the shoulders of about 15 people. With Potop‘s crisis in 1972 the workers wanted to limit partici-pation to workers and exclude externals, who were seen to only want to debate political lines and armed actions. Against the basic line of Potop, this even tually led to a split between economic and political struggle, i.e. between a union struggle and a political-military one. In this situati-on the Workers Committee sought contact to other `autonom ous‘ workers‘ groups in other cities at Alfa, Pirelli, Siemens etc. Only comrades who worked in factories themselves were allowed to take part at their joint meetings. After three years ho-

wever the same problems came up again, as some people brought up the organisa-tional question and pushed the Coordi-nation towards the Autonomia Operaia Organizzata. The Workers Committee did not get involved with that.

Assemblea Autonoma di Porto Marghera – Autonomous Assembly of Porto Marghe-ra. Formed in 1972 in the reorientation

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phase when the chemical workers reject-ed the new collective contract. The Work-ers Committee, together with workers from Lotta Continua and other workers who had left the union, tried to organize this discontent. To be an Autonomous Assem-bly meant to be autonomous from political groups, from the unions and from political parties. It was supposed be both a mass organization and a political organization. It was an attempt to build another structure based on all the experiences of the previ-ous years instead of starting from scratch again, and to ex pand from there. They used the old meeting point of the Workers Committee, but also the Social Centres in Marghera. Many workers who took part did not belong to any political group. The Autonomous Assembly functioned until 1975 when the phase of the Autonomia Operaia Or ganizzata.

Autonomia Operaia Organizzata — Organised Workers Autonomy. A party project after 1975. An attempt by various groups within the Autonomia to organize the countercultural Movement of 1977.

Comitati Politici – Political Committees. Attempt to merge Potere Operaio with Il Manifesto in common Political Commit-tees, which only lasted a few months. Pushed ahead by Finzi in particu lar.

Potere Operaio Veneto-Emiliano – News-paper published by the local editorial group of Classe Op eraia, it ran for three years and then merged into the national Potere Operaio newspaper.

Prima Linea – First Row. Armed group formed in 1976 by former Lotta Continua and Potere Op eraio members. Its mem-bers refused to go underground, in order to remain present within the movement. Disbanded in 1981.

Brigate Rosse – Red Brigades. Formed in 1970. Largest armed group in Italy. The fi rst actions were directed against fore-men and company executives in factories. Later they strategy aimed at the `heart of the state‘, including the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, the head of the DC.

Autoriduzione – Self reduction of rent, electricity and gas bills, food prices. Collective form of struggle in the early 1970s.

Scala mobile – literally: Escalator; offi cial Italian name: contingenza. Automatic cost of living bo nus on top of the wage using a points system. Abolished in 1977. Due to the high infl ation rates in the 1970s, the bonus part of the wage formed an increasingly large part of the wage. For

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this reason the wages of all wage workers increasingly converged.

Strategy of tension – From 1969 to 1984 members of the Italian military secret ser-vice SISMI (pre viously called SID), neo-fascists and parts of the Gladio network began a swathe of terror attacks and mur-ders in Italy killing more than 200 people and injuring about 600. The two most spectacular attacks marked the beginning and the end of this phase: Piazza Fonta-na in Milan in 1969 (16 dead) and the train station in Bologna in 1980. Through the dissemination of false information and falsi fi ed evidence, a secret service net-work ensured that the Left were blamed for these crimes.

Historical Compromise – from the 1973 military coup in Chile, PCI head Berlinguer drew the con clusion that the PCI could not come to power through elections without risking right-wing attempts of authoritarian infi ltration. His strategic line was to coope-rate with the democratic parties, in order to reach a consensus of reformist politics. Parts of the PCI and the DC left hoped for a coalition government which never came about. In practice, the historical compro-mise meant the three union confederati-ons‘ `politics of sacrifi ce‘ since 1976 and support for Andreotti‘s DC government of

`na tional solidarity‘ in 1978 for restabi-lising the Italian state. When parliament were due to discuss the government pro-gramme on the 16th March 1978 (when the PCI had just won the majority for the fi rst time) the Red Brigades kidnapped DC head Aldo Moro, the most important me-diating fi gure of this alliance. In the ensu-ing repression against the radical left, PCI politicians took the hardest stance of all.

7. April 1979 – On this day the wave of arrests against the members of Autonomia began.

Movement of 1977 – Cultural and youth movement which started in Bologna in the spring of 1977 and grew quickly mainly in the university towns. It did not really have roots in the previous move ments and clearly had a different social base, which marked them apart from the movements of 1968 and 1973. They refused the political elites, including those of 1968, criticised the groups such as Lotta Conti-nua and Autonomia Organizzata and broke with the unions. Many activists later ended up in armed groups, many of them were wrecked by the systematic infl ux of Heroin into the movement.

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Further Reading:

Operaismo Dossier

http://www.wildcat-www.de/dossiers/operaismus/operaismus_dossier.htm

A collection of texts and interviews around operaismo in German (not only) from Wildcat. This includes out-of-print texts by Alquati, Panzieri, Tronti and others.

Books:Steve Wright: Storming Heaven.A theoretical history of Operaism, Pluto Press, 2002

Title page of the Rosso newspaper 1977:You have paid dearly, You have not paid it all!